Myrna Loy (44 page)

Looking back, Myrna faulted herself, deciding she had been too compliant and too eager to accommodate Arthur. “Perhaps I should have kicked him in the teeth a couple of times, instead of trying to be the perfect wife he wanted” (
BB
, 170). Although she’d once walked out on MGM, confrontation didn’t come naturally to her. Cary Grant, her admirer and costar in three movies, said he saw her lose her cool only once, when she got mad at herself for flubbing a line.
¹³

Myrna’s inability to bear children also continued to grieve her. She bought a complete layette for the baby of her personal maid Theresa Penn, sent ice cream and cake to the hospital when the baby was born, and befriended a boy who sold newspapers around the MGM lot. Myrna had an instinctive rapport with young people and would serve as a surrogate aunt to any number of them. According to the intrusive, and not always reliable, Hedda Hopper, Myrna and Arthur briefly considered adopting. Hopper published an item saying that the couple wanted to adopt two children, neither one a baby. The couple, she said, “would prefer to have a little boy and girl out of an orphanage, about the age of five or six.” If they ever entertained such an intention, they didn’t act on it. Undertaking joint parenthood made no sense at the moment, given that the prospective parents might be splitting up. Arthur’s failure to share Myrna’s yearning for children increased her unhappiness and sense of isolation. She gained several pounds, which prompted catty whispers. She battled the flu and departed for another desert retreat.
¹⁴

Arthur’s feelings about Myrna are encapsulated in a remark from Irene Mayer Selznick. When she read Myrna’s revelations about her deep and enduring affection for Arthur in
Being and Becoming
, Irene talked about this with Arthur’s current wife, Leonora, Irene’s close friend. “I saw a lot of Arthur and Myrna,” Irene told Leonora. “Poor thing! Her adoration was not returned.” But though Irene Selznick spoke with the authority of an eyewitness, she harbored no particular fondness for Myrna, and her comment makes things too simple. Arthur did treat Myrna with harshness and cruelty, at times, but what made their breakup such a heartbreak was that he couldn’t make up his mind. He would cold-shoulder her one day and then begin to court her again the next. Each time she left him, down to the last, he kept signaling that he desperately wanted her back. Who wouldn’t find such behavior crazy-making?
¹⁵

The first Arthur-Myrna separation came in November 1940. “Myrna Loy Admits Rift; Plans Suit for Divorce; Actress Declares Marriage Has Proved Failure,” read the headline for the
Los Angeles Times
story. Louella Parsons had interrupted her weekly radio broadcast to announce the separation as breaking news, a “scoop.” Arthur soon issued a most gracious and affectionate statement: “We have tried for a long time to adjust the inescapable complications of our careers. That has not been possible. That still leaves her one of the loveliest women in the world.” A clean, permanent break would have caused far less pain, but that wasn’t in the cards—yet.
¹⁶

Myrna won plaudits in the press for keeping her own counsel. “Myrna Loy has won the respect and admiration of everyone in Hollywood following the breakup of her marriage,” blabbered Louella Parsons, who was herself a cause of Myrna’s elusiveness. “Not once, since her dignified explanation that she and Arthur Hornblow were parting, has Myrna appeared in a nightclub. Instead she has taken a very small house and only her most intimate friends are invited to visit or dine with her. Occasionally she accepts party invitations. But she always arrives early and leaves early. There is not the slightest doubt that the breakup caused her great sorrow. But Myrna is not the type to wear her heart on her sleeve.”
¹⁷

The movie community, and those tracking it, could get cynical about Hollywood vows of eternal devotion, but the marriage of Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow had been widely exalted as an exception to the rule. “The marriages of Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Carole Landis—this year’s crop of swift unions and swift dissolves—were all obviously madcap from start to fierce finish,” Elizabeth Owens wrote in a
Photoplay
article called “Why the Perfect Wife’s Marriage Failed.” Owens got specific: “Hollywood positively hoped that the Norma Shearer–George Raft romance would not last—and it didn’t. Everybody knew almost from the moment of the wedding that [Joan] Crawford and [Franchot] Tone would eventually part. But Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow Jr.! That was really a marriage, not just a flaming romance that had been solemnized with a ceremony.” To boost her claim that theirs had been a real love story, and elicit a heart-tugging sigh, Owens reminded readers that Arthur had handpicked Myrna’s wedding bouquet in Mexico back in June of 1936.
¹⁸

A few months after their announced breakup, Arthur and Myrna, explaining that they’d separated too hastily, jointly proclaimed reconciliation. They’d been spotted together at a sneak preview of Arthur’s air force picture,
I Wanted Wings
. Then they turned up dancing cheek to cheek at the Mocambo, a new nightclub on the Sunset Strip, Myrna radiant in a green gown and Arthur beaming. “When they were not dancing they were casually holding hands under the table.” Myrna moved back in with Arthur, who had already sold the big house on Hidden Valley Road and was living more modestly on Cherokee Lane in Beverly Hills. “She says no more big houses for them.” They called off the divorce and went on several vacation trips together, one to Mexico City, where they stayed near the home of Diego Rivera; one to the Canadian Rockies, where they celebrated Myrna’s thirty-sixth birthday; and a third to New York.
¹⁹

Bill Powell and his new bride, Diana Lewis, joined them in New York, and the foursome went to the theater and out on the town together. The new Mrs. Powell, nicknamed “Mousie” because she was petite, was twenty-one and Powell forty-seven when they’d wed the previous year. On their first date, according to Mousie, they’d attended a dinner party at Arthur and Myrna’s home, where Ronald Colman and Reginald Gardiner were also guests. Mousie laughingly remembered the occasion: “Mr. Poo [Powell] knocked my hand and the glass of wine I’m holding spills all over me. The next thing, he drops his roll in his soup and it dunks me. The next thing, he squirts a lime and it get[s] me in the eye.” These two were clearly in synch. Diana Lewis gave up her own embryonic MGM movie-acting career soon after the wedding. The Powells stayed together until the end of Bill’s life in 1984. An adoring, attractive, much younger wife not committed to a big career of her own—that seems to have been the winning ticket.
²⁰

The temporary, very public reconciliation of Arthur and Myrna was as much discussed and freighted with significance as their initial separation announcement had been. Because the wife in question was Myrna Loy, Hollywood’s paragon of wifedom, her domestic situation carried symbolic value, or at least it seemed to. “When lovely Myrna Loy—she of the sweet smile and the tip-tilted nose—blew back to the arms of husband Arthur Hornblow Jr. recently with the announcement that she was abandoning ‘hasty’ divorce plans, it was by no means another Hollywood interlude,” wrote Fred Dickenson in one American newspaper. “It was the sort of triumph for domesticity designed to rekindle the light of love in the newly betrothed and bolster the faith of the Hays office in life’s noble sentiments. It was, in short, the perfect thing for the Perfect Wife to do.” The public wanted to preserve its idealized image of Myrna and her dream marriage, founded (they’d been told) on love, mutual respect, parallel career success, and good taste. But the public’s hopes, along with Myrna’s, would be dashed.
²¹

As if to prove that art can imitate life, the theme of divorce crept into Myrna’s cinematic life in the early 1940s. Always a popular and timely topic in marriage-mad Hollywood, divorce took front-and-center position in the plots of the two Powell-Loy screwball comedies that MGM released while Myrna went through her private marital unraveling.

The reconciliation of an estranged couple is a built-in component of what Stanley Cavell called “the Hollywood comedy of remarriage,” but for the Loy-Powell comedy team it marked a departure. True, they’d played an estranged couple in
Evelyn Prentice
, but that was no comedy. In these two Loy-Powell comic vehicles they portray spouses on the brink of divorce, not an already divorced pair like Hepburn and Cary Grant in
The Philadelphia Story
or Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in
His Girl Friday
. Both times it’s the wife, Myrna Loy, who wants out of the marriage, and each time Powell is the panicky husband who’ll do anything, however off the wall, to win back the affection of his smart, beautiful, in-control, at times lofty, and dismissive wife.
²²

Both these comedies are subversive in that they make a husband’s sane, play-by-the-rules conventionality ridiculous and unpardonably dull. He’s only attractive when he’s nutty, bumbling, morally sleazy, or otherwise out of bounds. Powell, as husband, is more than willing to make a slapstick fool of himself, and Loy, as wife, loves him
for
his antic disposition, not in spite of it. Showing that he can charm Myrna Loy and make her frown dissolve into a smile does double duty, quashing plans for divorce as it sells the movie.

In
I Love You Again
, based on a novel by Octavus Roy Cohen, Powell has a split personality. He plays two versions of the same man, one virtuous, sober, and yawn-inspiring, the other an appealing cad. Before he’s whacked on the head with an oar, he’s a paragon of middle-American small-town respectability. As stuffed shirt Larry Wilson of Habersville, Pennsylvania, he’s shown himself to be a tightwad stalwart of the Rotary Club and the Hoot Owl Association, an upstanding citizen who manages a pottery plant and never drinks anything stronger than ginger ale mixed with grape juice. His idea of a good time is to stuff a dead skunk and turn the result into living room decor. But the anti–Larry Wilson, the man he used to be and reverts to when amnesia strikes, is con man George Carey, a smooth-talking, sharp dresser and lowlife spendthrift who’ll bend any rule to scam a dollar or steal a laugh. Comedy-writing veterans George Oppenheimer, Charles Lederer, and Harry Kurnitz shared credit for the witty script. Lederer, also a contributor to the script of
Love Crazy
, co-wrote, with Ben Hecht, the script for
His Girl Friday
, also released in 1940, and had been one of the screenwriters on
Topaze
.

Powell’s personality number one, the boring Larry Wilson, was away on a cruise excursion when the bop on the bean induced amnesia. His wife, Kay (Myrna Loy), comes to greet the boat at the pier—and to tell Larry that she’s decided she wants a divorce. Ditching her uptight husband will give her a shot at a new life, with more fun in it. She has a promising future husband already lined up. But of course Larry isn’t Larry any more; post bop on the bean, he’s transformed into personality number two, George Carey. George has no clue who this lovely woman named Kay might be, but he certainly finds her attractive and would like to keep her around. Kay soon discovers what an entertaining fellow her husband has become. Suddenly, he’s a great kisser. The former tightwad even takes her to a high-end department store to buy her an expensive negligee, the same winning strategy that erring husband Clark Gable employed for fretting wife Myrna Loy in
Test Pilot
. The movie doesn’t try to explain how Kay managed to fall for and marry no-fun Larry in the first place, but excesses of logic aren’t called for here.

Although her role in
I Love You Again
offered Myrna Loy little to do that she hadn’t done before onscreen, she excelled at playing a gorgeous, even-tempered, clever but caustic straight woman to Powell’s quick-change artist who can drool like a backward four-year-old or coo like a dove. She did get to crown Larry/George with a plate of scrambled eggs and to tell him, “I’ve often wished I could turn your head—on a spit over a slow fire.”

Myrna found joy in playing a forceful wife who holds the power card in her marriage. Her Kay is the decision maker, the one who has her head on straight and who can sink or save the marriage. “Heretofore I’ve always had to do the chasing after Bill,” Myrna told the
New York Post
. “This time he has to chase me, and believe me the chase is a merry one.” Being pursued by Bill Powell onscreen while in private life Arthur sent mixed messages, some of them signaling rejection, held obvious appeal.
²³

In
Love Crazy
Powell is again a shape-changer, Loy again cool, alluring, and steady in her determination to get a divorce, this time from a husband she thinks cheated on her on the night of their fourth wedding anniversary. Directed by Jack Conway, of
Libeled Lady
fame, and produced by the estimable Pandro Berman, who was new to MGM but had supervised many Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers hits at RKO,
Love Crazy
begins with an in-joke: Powell, in a cab with a box of red roses to present to his wife on their special day, sings along with a recording of a song from
The Great Ziegfeld
, which Luise Rainer had performed in that movie, “It’s Delightful to Be Married.” (Anna Held wrote the lyrics.) In
The Great Ziegfeld
Powell portrayed the philanderer Flo Ziegfeld, but this time he’s the devoted husband, Steve Ireland, a man convinced that “there’s nothing wrong with anyone’s life that a good marriage can’t cure.” He’s all lovey-dovey with Susan, his wife (Loy), as they set about celebrating this romantic occasion in a madcap way. They dance together in their chic, upscale apartment and plan to honor a tradition they’ve established of repeating on their anniversary the rituals they’d followed on their wedding day: going for a long hike, rowing on a lake, and ending up, before bed, with an intimate and festive dinner. Today though, instead of repeating the anniversary ritual in the order in which the events originally occurred, they’re going to do everything backwards. Before Susan’s intrusive mother (Florence Bates) interferes with their planned celebration, they’d intended to have the maid serve dinner with courses presented in reverse order, dessert served first. Zaniness has clearly been Steve Ireland’s signature, and Susan loves him for that—until she decides that he’s done her wrong, and it would be delightful to be
un
married.