Myrna Loy (45 page)

In the elevator of their chic Manhattan apartment building, Steve runs into an aggressive old flame, Isobel (Gail Patrick), and the slapstick mania begins when the elevator gets stuck between floors and Steve gets his head locked between the closing doors when he tries to climb out. Seductive Isobel lures him into her apartment, trying to put the make on Steve, but he resists. He’s anxious to get back to Susan and their anniversary festivities. His meddling mother-in-law, however, gets wind of Steve’s stop at the old flame’s apartment and plants seeds of distrust in Susan, who makes up her mind to divorce Steve right away. Steve won’t agree; he doesn’t want to lose his wife. When a lawyer advises him that Susan wouldn’t be able to divorce him for five years if he can demonstrate to psychiatrists on “the lunacy board” that he’s gone insane, the high jinks follow apace. One minute he’s at a party in top hat and tails, masquerading as Abraham Lincoln. He “frees” a black butler and liberates a bunch of top hats. The next minute he’s an inmate in the loony bin, caught in the branches of a tree when chasing after a bird. He finally reverts to drag, just as Cary Grant does in the celebrated cross-dressing scene in
Bringing Up Baby
. The cops are looking for Steve after he escapes from the insane asylum, so to elude them Steve reinvents himself as Steve’s matronly older sister. Looking Victorian in a wig, granny glasses, a long dark skirt, a lace jabot and a prim jacket stuffed with skeins of yarn to fill out the bosom, Steve even sounds like an old biddy. His very proper baritone speaking voice has shot up an octave or two, into the soprano register. Susan is his ally in the farce. By the time Steve is outed by the unspooling of the yarn that served as his fake bosom, she’s ready to forgive all and take him back into the bedroom.

These two comedies scored well both with critics and at the box office. The
Hollywood Reporter
pronounced
I Love You Again
“one of the best laugh pictures of the year.” Writing about
Love Crazy
, Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
applauded “the steady progression toward insanity” as a respite from the tired domesticity that the most recent
Thin Man
caper had served up. He concluded, “Everyone who worked on this picture must have trained rigidly on a routine of old slapstick comedies and a diet of loco-weed,” and that was fine with him. On MGM’s list of its top ten moneymakers of 1940–41,
Love Crazy
occupied the ninth spot, with
Gone with the Wind
in top position and
The Philadelphia Story
at number two.
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Myrna savored the manic humor in these two films and delighted in Powell’s brilliant daffiness, but her downcast frame of mind clashed with the fare MGM was offering her. As she put it, between her marital problems and the Nazis, “I wasn’t in the mood for froth” (
BB
, 170).

The war in Europe escalated during the unspooling of Myrna’s private world. Nazi tanks rolled into Paris and took the city in June of 1940, during one of the intervals she and Arthur were together, not separated. They’d rented a Malibu beach house from Madeleine Carroll for the summer. After learning of the siege, Jerome Kern, who had worked with Arthur on the musical
High, Wide and Handsome
, came by with friends for a beach house get-together. Kern sat down at the rickety upright piano and began to play a song he’d newly created with Oscar Hammerstein II (their only collaboration not written to order), “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” The song also marked the only time that the Hammerstein words preceded the Kern music. The next year, “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” by then recorded by Kate Smith and Noel Coward, turned up in the movie
Lady Be Good;
Ann Sothern sang it, and it won the Academy Award for Best Song. That June day in Malibu, everyone present wept as Kern played the soon-to-be-famous melody in the presence of Arthur and Myrna, softly intoning the elegiac words that for many summed up welling emotions for the stricken city of light (
BB
, 165). Myrna and Arthur had visited Paris together during that 1935 premarital honeymoon and again just a year back, in the summer of 1939.
²⁵

With the notable exception of Maurice Chevalier, who returned to his homeland and performed in occupied Paris, Hollywood talent promptly united in various efforts to support the besieged British and the French. At a benefit for the latter, Lotte Lehmann sang, accompanied by Bruno Walter. Tyrone Power and Fredric March served as masters of ceremony, and Myrna, grandly gowned, sold cigarettes along with Bette Davis, Merle Oberon, Norma Shearer, Irene Dunne, and Olivia de Havilland. With Cary Grant (who would soon costar with Myrna in a Lux Radio Theater version of
I Love You Again
), Rosalind Russell, and Charles Boyer, Myrna sold peanuts at a Buy-a-Bomber benefit. She joined Merle Oberon, Claudette Colbert, Annabella, and Maureen O’Sullivan as cigarette girls at a Cocoanut Grove fund-raiser for Franco-British War Relief. At the same event Bill Powell, Charles Laughton, Herbert Marshall, Ronald Colman, and Laurence Olivier joined a jocular chorus line to belt out “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” (
BB
, 164–65).
²⁶

On December 7, 1941, Japan invaded Pearl Harbor, and FDR subsequently declared war. Myrna happened to be in New York with her close friend Natalie Visart. They were both taking breathers, Myrna from the tumult of life with (and without) Arthur, and Natalie from her labors as costume designer for DeMille’s
Reap the Wild Wind
. Still involved with the director Mitchell Leisen, Arthur’s frequent collaborator at Paramount, Natalie had an office near Arthur’s on the Paramount lot. Arthur would pump her for news about Myrna during the intervals when he and Myrna were separated. Altogether, Myrna left Arthur five different times, and each time took a piece out of her hide.

The pre-Christmas escape to the elegant Manhattan St. Regis Hotel allowed Myrna to test her wings. She had neither Arthur nor an MGM publicist to shepherd her, plan her every move, or shield her from autograph hounds and crowds of fans. On her own in Manhattan, or with Natalie, she found herself mobbed wherever she went and tried to avoid places like Fifth Avenue during daylight hours. Myrna had mixed emotions about this venture into relative independence, finding it at once liberating and scary. MGM stars were notoriously coddled and usually kept on a short leash. Myrna had yet to experience riding in a Manhattan subway or a municipal bus. She had rarely even hailed a cab on her own.

She learned about the Japanese invasion via a phone conversation with Arthur’s first wife, Juliette, who called the hotel while nine-year-old Terry Hornblow was visiting Myrna there. Juliette, who was living on the East Coast, told Myrna, “We’ve been attacked!” (
BB
, 168).

Arthur had been thinking about flying to New York to join Myrna, but when the United States declared war on Japan, he decided this was no time to travel. He wanted to stay in California, where the fear of a further Japanese attack ran high, and where he might be of service. Myrna immediately got on a plane to return to Arthur’s side, and to try to calm Della, whose anxiety about an imminent Japanese invasion of California had made her hysterical.

Myrna learned on her arrival in Los Angeles that the city had been transformed. Fear, anger, and patriotic defiance had taken hold. People wore stricken expressions, and a rush to enlist in the armed forces had begun. The Burbank airport was cloaked in camouflage. The wail of testing air raid sirens periodically punctured the silence. There was talk of camouflaging the major movie studios to make them look less like airplane hangars and more like innocent orchards. The Hornblow station wagon had been commandeered for use during blackouts as an air raid precaution, and Arthur himself had signed up as an air raid warden. “Yachts and pleasure craft of film stars are being eyed by the Navy for takeover,”
Variety
reported. Soldiers with antiaircraft artillery had been posted up the hill from the Hornblows’ Coldwater Canyon house. Myrna sent a portable stove to keep them warm.
²⁷

During the tumultuous interval before Myrna and Arthur decisively terminated their marriage, Myrna remained busy both as an actress and as a volunteer for the war effort. The fourth
Thin Man
movie,
Shadow of the Thin Man
hit theaters a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. Major W. S. Van Dyke of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve directed, in what would be his last venture as Myrna’s boss. Because he was ill with lung cancer, he’d been turned away from active service in the marines, to his chagrin. With a so-so script by Irving Brecher and Harry Kurnitz, this was the first
Thin Man
movie without direct input from Hammett, who was currently working on an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s
The Watch on the Rhine
.

Shadow of the Thin Man
serves up a smooth-edged, predictable version of Nick and Nora. They now have a son (Dickie Hall) in military school and a maid (Louise Beavers) to pour their martinis. Although they tool around in an open-top convertible and spend plenty of time at the racetrack, where the shooting of a jockey triggers the mystery plot, it’s not their raciness but their cutesy home life that defines them. They live in a spacious San Francisco apartment with art deco mirrors, and Nora, clad in a filmy peignoir, can go to a wrought-iron balcony and peer through binoculars to spot Nick reading to their uniformed young son on a park bench. She doesn’t realize that he’s reading the horse racing form, not a book of fairy tales for kids. This joke, like the one mocking Nick as he’s forced to drink milk to oblige his son, shows signs of strain. The deft, sardonic touches of the Hackett-Goodrich scripts are glaringly absent. “The Charleses, we’re afraid, are settling down,” opined the
New York Times
. “Some of their former reckless
joie de vivre
is gone.” The formula might be getting stale, but audiences nonetheless flocked to see
Shadow of the Thin Man
, which grossed $2.3 million.
²⁸

When it came to leaving an imprint,
Shadow of the Thin Man
couldn’t touch another Hammett spin-off,
The Maltese Falcon
, the noir version (there had been two prior films based on the story) directed by John Huston that was released a few weeks before
Shadow of the Thin Man
. Featuring Humphrey Bogart as a tense, cynical, tough-guy Sam Spade,
The Maltese Falcon
made Bogart a star and turned his dark-haired Spade into a touchstone. Bogart’s Sam Spade became the private eye antihero of the decade, as Powell’s Nick Charles had been for the 1930s. Nick and Nora’s romp at the racetrack seemed nostalgic and slightly quaint by comparison.

Melvyn Douglas, Myrna’s costar in 1940’s
Third Finger, Left Hand
, and more famously Garbo’s in the previous year’s
Ninotchka
, had become so visible as a leader in anti-Nazi and pro-Roosevelt circles that his schedule of political speeches and meetings ran neck and neck with his acting career. He was considering a run for Congress. Stirred to activism after a trip to Nazi Germany with his wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Douglas became a spokesman for the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, a group dedicated to promoting the New Deal in California. He campaigned hard for Culbert Olson, the first Democrat to be elected governor of California in forty years, and was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1940. That same year, his wife became a member of the Democratic National Committee. Horrified by Melvyn Douglas’s well-publicized political outspokenness, Louis B. Mayer reprimanded him privately, telling the MGM actor that he could think whatever he pleased, “but you don’t do yourself any good at the studio when you take part in activities which are bound to offend a lot of people.” Melvyn offered to cancel his contract, but Mayer didn’t warm to that idea—since Douglas had shown he had plenty of box-office appeal as a sophisticated leading man in comedies. The conference in Mayer’s office ended in a standoff, but Douglas believed that afterward the studio brass cold-shouldered him. He began working more often at Columbia Pictures and would soon enlist in the army.
²⁹

Although Melvyn Douglas, like Myrna, was a liberal anticommunist, he incurred the wrath of Red baiters because he’d worked in cooperation with known reds, such as Donald Ogden Stewart, and because he’d spoken out, along with leftists, against isolationism and Hitler. The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact fractured the left and destroyed the alliances between liberals and radicals that had made the now defunct Hollywood Anti-Nazi League possible. In the early 1940s a new wave of “fellow traveler” accusations against movie stars swept Washington. Rep. Martin Dies fingered Jimmy Cagney, Fredric March, and Humphrey Bogart for their possibly “un-American activities,” and in the California State Assembly Melvyn Douglas again found himself accused of being a communist. Some of the slurs against Douglas were tinged with anti-Semitism, harping on his Jewish original surname, Hesselberg. The
Los Angeles Times
tepidly defended him as merely a “parlor pink.”
³⁰

Three months before Pearl Harbor, a Senate subcommittee set about investigating “war mongering” propaganda in Hollywood, attacking American-made motion pictures for delivering a covert anti-Nazi and pro-British message. Two of the movies singled out were the box-office sensation
Sergeant York
, starring Gary Cooper as the World War I hero Alvin York, and Chaplin’s highly popular spoof of Hitler,
The Great Dictator
. North Dakota Republican Gerald Nye accused Hollywood’s producers, “all born abroad and animated by the persecutions and hatreds of the Old World,” of injecting prowar propaganda into American films. Harry Warner, head of the studio that made
Sergeant York
, argued in a hearing on Moving Picture Propaganda, “You may correctly charge me with being anti-Nazi. But no one can charge me with being anti-American.”
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