Myrna Loy (47 page)

When, separated from Arthur, Myrna had stopped in New York in March of 1942 to do fund-raising for war relief, John had aggressively pursued her, sending her bouquet after bouquet of gorgeous flowers, inundating her with invitations, squiring her around Manhattan’s chic café society nightclubs, and phoning her at all hours, day and night, at Park Avenue’s Drake Hotel, where she was staying. John’s midnight calls were a trademark. While in Nevada to get her divorce, between crying jags Myrna spent considerable time on the phone talking to him (
BB
, 176). When she boarded the plane for New York, Reno divorce papers in hand, she hadn’t yet made up her mind to remarry. Six days later, yielding to John’s tireless entreaties, she did just that.

The spur-of-the-moment wedding, at which Myrna wore a Little Bo Peep bonnet that made her look girlish, took place at the East Side Manhattan home of John’s sister Helen (at the time Mrs. Robert Leylan and later the wife of Paul Hexter), with whom Myrna would become fast friends. Looking back on this disastrous second marriage, Myrna cited the friendship with Helen as one of its ancillary benefits. Helen’s affection and generosity continued after they ceased to be sisters-in-law. She telephoned Myrna in the 1980s, following one of Myrna’s many operations, offering to lend her funds, if she needed them; Helen pleaded that she had far more money than she needed, implying that Myrna would be doing her a favor by relieving her of some of it. Myrna declined but was touched (
BB
, 184). No member of Myrna’s family attended this second wedding.

The newlyweds honeymooned in Miami, where a reporter who tracked them down inquired about Myrna’s plans for future films. “Mrs. Hertz thought her next picture would be another of the Thin Man series,” the article reported, “but her husband interposed, ‘She may have other plans—not dramatic.’ ” John didn’t want Myrna to work. Not thinking through her decisions very thoroughly, Myrna knew with certainty that after close to twenty years of laboring in Hollywood with few downtimes, she needed an extended rest.
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The
Thin Man
movie that Myrna mentioned, the one that in 1945 became
The Thin Man Goes Home
, was slated for production in June of 1942, although the script had not yet been written. Harry Kurnitz was working on the story (which he would complete with Robert Riskin) just as Myrna prepared for Reno and the divorce from Arthur. She had told MGM she could not report for work then, being in no condition to do so. Metro put the picture on hold and, because she was leaving her contract unfulfilled, put Myrna under “technical suspension.” Her contract still had four years to go before it expired or would need to be renegotiated. Loew’s chief, Nick Schenck, based in New York, took Myrna’s newest unauthorized work furlough as a personal affront. According to Myrna, he considered her irresponsible and was furious with her.
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Myrna and John settled into luxurious quarters in a rented eight-room terraced duplex at 322 East Fifty-seventh Street, a building renowned for its double-height living rooms in every unit. As Myrna threw herself into decorating the apartment, John tried to help by bringing Myrna’s brother, David, and his new wife, Lynn, to New York and setting David up with a job. Myrna’s lifelong friend Betty Black considered David a ball and chain to his older sister. He aspired to be an artist, but because his mother and sister had spoiled him, he kept wanting to work from the top down, not from the bottom up. David and Lynn Williams would return to California as soon as Myrna’s marriage to John collapsed.
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Bill Powell and Mousie came to New York to say hello, and Bill was photographed at the fashionable Stork Club with John and Myrna. In one newspaper the photo caption read, “The Perfect Wife and Two Perfect Husbands.” On the surface everything looked posh and festive. But John’s dark side manifested itself in his paranoid response to Powell. He resented Myrna’s deep affection for her favorite costar and convinced himself that Myrna and Bill had been having an affair. He also harbored jealousy of her fame and the attention she generated wherever she went.
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Even before she left California, Myrna had allowed her business affairs to come undone. She hadn’t been paying attention. Her agent Myron Selznick’s office, together with Myrna’s Los Angeles attorney, Martin Gang, tried to make sense of her chaotic finances. In June of 1942 she had earned $80,000 so far for the year (more than $1 million in current dollars) but owed $50,907 in federal income taxes. She owed Arthur $5,771 for that share of household expenses he insisted she owed, and she was paying Bundles for Bluejackets more than $600 to outfit a submarine crew. Unless she returned to work, her earnings from MGM would be sharply reduced. In an economy move, Della’s allowance was cut to fifty dollars weekly, Aunt Lu’s to twenty-five dollars. Della, alarmed by her reduced circumstances, insisted in a letter to the Selznick office secretary that she cared only for Myrna’s happiness and wouldn’t dream of asking John Hertz Jr. for money. Myrna, with sadness, terminated the services of her maid and friend, Theresa Penn, who remained in Los Angeles, but Myrna stipulated that the child actor Dickie Hall (Nick Charles Jr. in
Shadow of the Thin Man
) was to continue to receive fifteen dollars a week from Myrna’s bank account for piano lessons.
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Because John had plenty of money and didn’t want a working wife any more than Myrna wanted to report to MGM, Myrna felt free to put off the studio, but she didn’t go so far as to slam the door and bolt it. She still had a viable contract, a famous name, and a loyal following. Mayer wanted her to continue to make pictures, even as she violated the terms of her contract by moving to New York and going into near-retirement.

She visited Los Angeles and Della in the fall following her new marriage, and it was reported that she was being considered for a role in
A Guy Named Joe
opposite Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson. Irene Dunne instead took that part. Newly signed to an MGM contract, Dunne had briefly been mentioned as a possible pinch-hitter for Myrna Loy in the next
Thin Man
picture, but neither Metro nor the public seemed to warm to the idea of anyone but Myrna Loy taking on the role opposite Powell.
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Although Myrna’s private life took up plenty of space, the war and world politics remained major concerns for her. Via her new sister-in-law, Helen, Myrna had met Jan Masaryk, and the two had formed a bond that solidified her identification with him and with Hitler’s European victims as a group. Masaryk visited New York often, spending time with Myrna whenever he could. A spirited, warmhearted, and fascinating guest, he loved to cook, to play the piano, and to tell stories about his past life as the son of the first Czech president. Casual and lighthearted among friends, he was at the same time a man of depth and compassion, someone who along with his countrymen had sustained political body blows, which he countered with shows of defiance and courage. He confided his dream of one day returning to a democratic Czechoslovakia.

As a celebrity Myrna realized that her participation in public war relief campaigns could help immeasurably. In Madison Square Garden, on the last day of September 1942, she joined a throng of stellar performers—Charles Laughton, Ethel Merman, Al Jolson, Kate Smith, and the Ink Spots—at a gala Army Emergency Relief show that lasted four and a half hours. Twenty thousand people attended, making the event a standing-room-only success. Mayor La Guardia took baton in hand to conduct a band playing a Sousa march. Danny Kaye and Lily Pons spoofed
A Night at the Opera
. Lieutenant Burgess Meredith recited a poem and Lillian Gish a prayer. Myrna executed a mock striptease, auctioning off articles of her shed clothing to the highest bidder. Her hat fetched $30,000 in bond sales, her long crimson evening gloves, $25,000. By the end of the marathon event, the assistant secretary of the treasury announced that the department’s goal of $775 million in bond sales had been reached (
BB
, 181). The newspapers reported that at the Madison Square Garden gala Myrna Loy sold more bonds than any other actress.
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John’s work for Greek War Relief brought him into the sphere of Eleanor Roosevelt, a booster in the campaign to generate humanitarian aid to the German-occupied nation. Myrna accompanied John to Washington, and there she made her first of several visits to the Roosevelt White House. She’d hoped to meet FDR in the flesh. Myrna idolized the president and had reason to believe that he in turn counted himself among her ardent fans. According to FDR’s private secretary, Grace Tully, “the President’s favorite actress was Myrna Loy. He plied Hollywood visitors with questions about her, wanted very much to meet her.” Myrna Loy films had been screened at the first floor White House movie theater that FDR installed and even, she’d been told, aboard ship during the 1941 Atlantic Charter Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill (
BB
, 179). In the first week of his presidency, FDR viewed
When Ladies Meet
. According to
Variety
, President Roosevelt, a confirmed moviegoer, saw five times as many films as Coolidge did when president, four times as many as Hoover.
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To Myrna’s disappointment, she never did enjoy the much-anticipated face-to-face encounter with FDR. For one reason or another the overburdened president had to be elsewhere each time she visited the White House. The last time, a few months before his death, he was away at Yalta. On that occasion, in January of 1945, Mrs. Roosevelt took Myrna, Gene Kelly, Joe E. Brown, Jane Wyman, Danny Kaye, Alan Ladd, and Veronica Lake, all in Washington to attend the annual Birthday Ball Benefit events for the March of Dimes, on a tour of the Oval Office and FDR’s private study. Not realizing that the president would be absent, Myrna had dressed with special care in a knockout black dress and a white organdy John Frederic hat. When Mrs. Roosevelt saw her, she said, “Oh my dear, my husband is going to be so distressed [that he missed meeting you]” (
BB
, 188). She knew FDR’s soft spot for Myrna Loy and conveyed to Myrna the message that it didn’t threaten her.

Myrna got to know Eleanor Roosevelt quite well over time and admired her more than any other woman in public life. One of the things she most esteemed about the first lady was her willingness to work without stint. She ran herself ragged, along with all those she enlisted as helpers, explaining, “I am my husband’s legs.” Essentially a shy person, Mrs. Roosevelt learned to get beyond that shyness and draw others in. An autographed portrait of her, inscribed “To Myrna Loy, with my warmest good wishes,” held a place of honor in Myrna’s last New York apartment. Mrs. Roosevelt would often call on Myrna to help out on behalf of causes they espoused in common, from fund-raising and troop support during the war to bolstering the United Nations in the postwar years and aiding the senatorial campaign of Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950. After a day of being led around by the energetic Mrs. Roosevelt, Myrna would tell Betty Black (who was living in Washington), “That old gal has just worn me to pieces.”
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During that first White House visit, Mrs. Roosevelt graciously made Myrna feel that she, not the first lady, deserved the spotlight. She briefly left John and Myrna in the Blue Room and promptly returned with Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who wanted to be introduced to Myrna Loy.

The president and Mrs. Roosevelt invited Myrna to their Hyde Park home to help them entertain a distinguished visitor, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Myrna was to appear in a short play, “Button Your Lip,” written by Private First Class Irving Gaynor Neiman, about a Brooklyn-born rookie in the army who yearns to meet the woman of his dreams, Myrna Loy. It had recently been staged as part of a program of award-winning one-act plays written and acted by enlisted men that producer John Golden had presented on Broadway under the joint title
The Army Play by Play
. On opening night on Broadway, at a performance attended by Mrs. Roosevelt, Mayor La Guardia, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Myrna had delighted everyone by walking onstage in the closing scene. As presented in Hyde Park for the Dutch Queen and FDR, Myrna was to again play herself in “Button Your Lip.” But on the day of the performance she had to cancel her Hyde Park appearance because her husband, in a drunken rage, had assaulted her the previous night and left her with a hideous black eye. Mrs. Roosevelt stood in for Myrna in the sketch, calling out from her seat, “Miss Loy cannot be here. Can’t I take her place?” “First Lady Takes Role of Myrna Loy,” read the
New York Times
headline.
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Later, when she came to know Mrs. Roosevelt better, Myrna confessed to her the true reason she had cancelled her appearance in Hyde Park, and the first lady had expressed shock and sympathy, saying, “Oh, what a terrible thing.” She added that if she, the first lady, hadn’t volunteered to pinch-hit for Myrna, the imposing, voluminous Queen Wilhelmina might have had to do so. The image of such a possibility prompted gales of shared laughter. “We had the greatest time over that,” Myrna recalled, adding that despite her depth and breadth of information about so many topics of the day, Eleanor Roosevelt possessed a certain innocence. Myrna insisted that Mrs. Roosevelt could not possibly have been a lesbian, which a biographer had suggested, and that she wouldn’t have even known the meaning of the word (
BB
, 180). Perhaps the innocent one here was Myrna.

John’s alcohol-fueled violent rages seemed to come without provocation. They could not be explained rationally. Yes, he resented Myrna’s fame and the time she spent away from him, but their true origin resided in John’s mental illness.

Since she was taking a leave from films, but still had the high energy and work ethic that had always driven her, Myrna got busy during her Mrs. Hertz period in New York as a volunteer for the American Red Cross. By April of 1943, less than a year into her second marriage, she had taken on an unsalaried full-time job as assistant to the director of the Military and Naval Welfare Service for the North Atlantic area. Her duties involved serving as a liaison between entertainers and military hospitals or rest homes, setting up visits by Broadway and Hollywood performers to wounded or disabled members of the armed forces. Myrna made countless hospital visits herself, sometimes returning home alone by bus or train. In contrast to the pampering she’d enjoyed as a star, she now carried her own luggage and accepted uncomfortable travel conditions without complaint. She squeezed into crowded coaches and resigned herself to the possibility that a train reserved for the troops might sidetrack her scheduled train. “Recently,” she told the
Los Angeles Times
, “we had as many as ten companies entertaining servicemen in forty-two East Coast centers.” The Red Cross work got into her blood. “Once you have seen these men and talked with them, watched their faces light up and heard them call you by your first name (to them you are something of home), you can’t stay away too long.”
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