Myrna Loy (46 page)

The U.S. engagement in the war put Red Scare tactics on a back burner for a while—but they’d be back, and Myrna would put in her rounds battling them.

Myrna’s activism in the early years of the war mainly involved lending her presence and her name to raise money for overseas relief and to support American troops. She joined other Hollywood luminaries—Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Spencer Tracy, and Ronald Colman—on an international radio broadcast, “America Calling,” to raise money for Greek War Relief. Bob Hope and Jack Benny were cohosts, Melvyn Douglas narrated, and Myrna and Mary Martin appeared in a sketch with Hope and Benny.
³²

She traveled to New York to appear with John Garfield and Janet Gaynor at a Navy Relief Show in Madison Square Garden. She persuaded Victor Fleming, Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, and Frank Morgan to pledge ten dollars a month for a group called Bundles for Bluejackets, which supported the U.S. Navy. She donned a blue uniform, and, along with Virginia (Mrs. Darryl) Zanuck and Kay Francis, worked the night shift at a Bundles for Bluejackets canteen that served coffee and doughnuts to men and women from a nearby training base in San Pedro Harbor, Long Beach. Myrna said she enjoyed the company of Kay Francis, someone Arthur had known since the days of his first marriage. “She was a little ahead of her time, using four letter words that shocked me terribly, but I liked her” (
BB
, 168). Myrna probably didn’t know that Kay and Arthur had gone beyond a platonic relationship; if she did know, she didn’t make an issue of it when working at the canteen.
³³

Many photos were taken of Myrna in uniform during the war years. Putting on a uniform tagged her as someone in service, and that was how she wanted to be known. Even her daywear took on a military cast, as a penchant for clothes with no frills and clean lines took hold among designers. Her favorite movie costumer, Dolly Tree, designed a fitted topcoat for her with the same tailoring and collar found in officers’ overcoats.
³⁴

Just days after Pearl Harbor, a group of Hollywood actors got together to form the Hollywood Victory Committee, an organization whose mission was to funnel talent into hospital tours, shows at training camps for the military, and bond rallies (
BB
, 168). “We had our first meeting on Beverly Drive, over a delicatessen, with everybody screaming and interrupting everybody else,” recalled Rosalind Russell, whose Danish wedding, to Frederick Brisson, Myrna had recently attended with Arthur. Gary Cooper turned out to be the champion seller of war bonds. Clark Gable chaired the Screen Actors division of the Victory Committee, and he in turn enlisted Myrna, who remembered Mrs. Gable, that human firecracker professionally known as Carole Lombard, as the most gung-ho patriot in the bunch, the first to pledge all-out support.
³⁵

A more politically engaged person than Clark Gable usually was, Carole Lombard, one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood and much beloved in the movie community, had visited FDR in the White House shortly after his election to his third term and had been an ardent New Deal Democrat from day one of the Roosevelt presidency. A passionate advocate for the United States and the Allies after Pearl Harbor, she’d sold more than $2 million worth of bonds and was returning from a bond rally in her home state of Indiana when she and her mother (and others) were killed early in 1942, in a Nevada plane crash. She and Gable had been married just under three years, and Lombard was only thirty-three when her plane crashed into the side of a mountain. Myrna referred to Carole as Hollywood’s first war casualty (
BB
, 169). FDR awarded her a posthumous Medal of Freedom.

Myrna, Bill Powell, Spencer Tracy, and Gable himself were the only Metro actors present at the grim private funeral. A few other luminaries, Jack Benny and Lombard’s frequent costar Fred MacMurray among them, joined the select group of stunned mourners. Ernst Lubitsch, who’d just finished directing Lombard in the yet-to-be-released anti-Nazi comedy
To Be or Not to Be
, also paid his respects. Inconsolable, Gable refused to speak with any of them. Lombard, who had overruled her mother’s wish to take the train back to California instead of flying, had specified in her will that she wished her funeral to be a simple, dignified occasion. She wanted none of the mawkish, overproduced spectacle she’d witnessed at Jean Harlow’s Forest Lawn funerary extravaganza.
³⁶

Grief-stricken, Gable enlisted in the air corps eight months after Lombard died, in part because Lombard had urged him to sign up. Explaining that with the country at war, acting had lost its luster, he became a tail-gunner on a B-17 bomber. A tiny diamond shard found in the plane wreckage where Lombard died—part of an earring he’d given to Carole—found its way into a piece of jewelry he now wore around his neck, along with his dog-tag, at all times. In uniform Gable looked very much like the pilots he’d portrayed in
Night Flight, Test Pilot
, and
Too Hot to Handle
, except that he’d shaved off his mustache after enlisting and had lost sparkle; he now wore a somber expression. He’d enlisted in the air force as a private but soon became a second lieutenant and when aloft in his B-17 bomber refused to wear a parachute, insisting that if his plane went down, he wanted to go with it. Hitler enjoyed Gable onscreen, and Goering, his air minister, offered a $5,000 reward for Gable’s capture.
³⁷

L. B. Mayer made it clear that studio profits still mattered more to him than defeating Hitler or winning the war. He discouraged Jimmy Stewart from enlisting in the air force, which Stewart went ahead and did early on, before Pearl Harbor. Mayer pulled strings to keep Mickey Rooney on the back lot instead of in the military. Rooney enlisted anyhow in 1944. Robert Montgomery also listened to his conscience, instead of Mayer, and drove an American Field Service ambulance in France after the German invasions of Holland and Belgium. He later joined the U.S. Navy. FDR’s 1942 birthday celebration in Washington, a high-profile event that raised money for the March of Dimes, was attended by four movie actors in uniform, two of them from MGM: Lieutenant James Stewart, U.S. Army; Lt. Commander Robert Montgomery and Lt. Commander Douglas Fairbanks Jr. of the Navy; and Ensign Wayne Morris, also of the Navy.
³⁸

With so many Metro leading men overseas, the women stars held sway, but Myrna’s acting career didn’t benefit from this era of female dominance, any more than it benefited from the wartime economic boom. Although she remained on the
Motion Picture Herald
list of top stars for 1940, her name disappeared from the lineup the following year, never to reappear. In
Variety
’s reckoning Bette Davis was the top actress in both 1941 and 1942, with Dorothy Lamour giving her a run for her money and Judy Garland taking front position among actresses at MGM.
³⁹

Myrna faced more direct competition at her home studio in the person of an actress newly signed by MGM, Katharine Hepburn, whose film career rebounded wildly after hitting a low point in 1938, when she was tagged “box-office poison.” Hepburn had redeemed herself onstage with her Broadway triumph in Philip Barry’s
The Philadelphia Story
. She then shrewdly bought the film rights to the play, with financial help from Howard Hughes. Studios competed to acquire the movie rights, which, naturally, Hepburn controlled. She not only starred; she also picked her director (Cukor) and costars. MGM won screen rights to the Barry play, and Hepburn’s vibrant performance as Tracy Lord copped an Oscar nomination, one of six for
The Philadelphia Story
. Hepburn soon signed a multipicture MGM contract and became the top-ranked comedy actress at MGM, with Roz Russell, originally hired to replace absent Myrna Loy in 193 5, also a contender. Hepburn’s series of nine movies opposite Spencer Tracy would follow. Apart from her brilliance as a performer, Katharine Hepburn displayed an aggressive me-first business savvy that Myrna Loy simply didn’t possess.

There are other explanations for Myrna’s slide in star standing, one being that she’d already had a long run by Hollywood standards and had passed her thirty-fifth birthday. She needed a role that would break the mold, and that role didn’t materialize. Another was that Hollywood at the time was experiencing what Joan Crawford called “the British invasion,” when a number of U.K. actors came to work in Hollywood and flourished. Irish-born Greer Garson enjoyed the favor of both Louis B. Mayer, who brought her over from London, and the moviegoing public. Garson had been cast in her debut MGM role in
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
after Myrna took herself out of the running by going over to Fox to play Lady Esketh in
The Rains Came
. Garson became the upper-class movie wife of choice after she took the title role in 1942’s
Mrs. Miniver
opposite Walter Pidgeon. Directed by William Wyler,
Mrs. Miniver
earned the highest grosses since
Ben-Hur
and dominated the 1942 Academy Awards, winning six statues, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director. Celebrating British courage and grit in the face of the German bombardment, the picture captured the emotional and patriotic fervor that many Americans, in solidarity with England, were feeling. The movie was released just six months after Pearl Harbor. The Minivers, giving everything they had, including their enlisted son, to defeat the Luftwaffe, became the poster couple of the war era.

After the extended prologue, Myrna’s divorce from Arthur finally occurred early in June of 1942, with more whimper than bang. A friend, Gladys Belknap Rowley, met Myrna’s train when she arrived in Reno to establish residence, as required by law. Myrna welcomed having an occasional local companion, but these were sad and lonely days. She’d rented a five-room house at Washoe Pines Ranch, south of Reno, which she and Theresa Penn occupied. At the divorce hearing, which lasted all of three minutes, Arthur, not present, was represented by his attorney. Arthur was in the process of jumping from Paramount to MGM and was completing his last Paramount film on his expiring contract. The prospect of running into him on the MGM lot in the future did not fill Myrna’s heart with glee. She pleaded mental cruelty, and the divorce went uncontested. Wearing “a gray tweed suit, and a large tailored hat which accentuated her gray eyes,” Myrna promptly departed alone for New York by plane.
⁴⁰

To the shock of everyone who knew her, she was renouncing Hollywood and her career. A new suitor awaited her in New York, along with an altogether different kind of life.

CHAPTER 14

Rebound

There it was for all to see, in every daily newspaper in the States, even the sober
New York Times:
“Myrna Loy Bride of John Hertz Jr.”
¹

Myrna had known John Daniel Hertz Jr. for only a short time when they wed. They met on Hidden Valley Road at a dinner party hosted by Arthur and Myrna in their waning days as a married couple. John’s father, John Hertz Sr., founder of Hertz Car Rental and Yellow Cab, was a hard-driving, rags-to-riches Chicagoan born in Austro-Hungary. A partner at Lehman Brothers and owner of prize racehorses, he had extensive ties to the financial wing of Paramount Pictures. Always overshadowed by his father, John Jr., at thirty-four years old, was three years younger than Myrna. The junior John held an executive position at New York’s Buchanan advertising agency, which had an account with Paramount and did publicity for Greek War Relief, one of Myrna’s causes. John Hertz Sr. controlled the Buchanan agency, so the son owed his job, as well as most of his wealth, to his tycoon dad, with whom he wasn’t even on speaking terms when he and Myrna recited their vows.

John Jr. had attended a military academy and Cornell, and as a young man he had distinguished himself as a yachtsman and polo player; but compared to Myrna, he hadn’t done much living. He’d led a protected, rich-kid life, dating debutantes, sailing his yacht, and shuttling between New York and points west. Conveniently, his father held a major interest in Trans World Airlines.
²

Myrna didn’t know when she married John that he had a history of profound mental instability or that he abused alcohol (and possibly opiates as well) or that he had logged many hours with psychiatrists. She wasn’t remembering her own insight into herself, divulged years earlier in an unusually candid interview: “I am one of those perverse creatures,” she’d confessed, “who has a positive talent for falling in love with the wrong man. I mean someone whom I should have sense enough to know would be temperamentally unsuited to me.” “Falling in love” may not even accurately describe Myrna’s headlong romance with John. She turned to him out of extreme need while in a fragile emotional state.
³

Not especially attractive physically, John appeared to be offering Myrna pure devotion during and immediately following her meltdown with Arthur, when she sorely needed just that. “You’re the beloved of millions,” he’d told her on the night they first met, after he’d impulsively taken her hands in his, “but your hands are cold and sweaty” (
BB
, 172). He seemed to be supplying a shoulder to lean on and lots of coddling, all in a locale, New York City, that promised glamour and stimulation three thousand miles away from the place she wanted to escape, Los Angeles. What better place for starting over than Manhattan? Myrna had thought of it as her ideal refuge from the day she first saw it, back in 1935.

Arthur happened to be in New York when news of Myrna’s remarriage hit the papers. He would read about his former wife becoming Mrs. John Hertz Jr. and understand that she had irrevocably moved on.

Eleven-year-old Terry Hornblow attended school nearby. Distraught when he learned that Myrna had divorced his father, he feared he would lose contact with his stepmother, with whom he’d formed an abiding attachment. His mother, Juliette, assured him that he could continue to spend time with Myrna, and to Myrna’s enduring gratitude she allowed that to happen.