Myrna Loy (49 page)

Dwight Taylor, the screenwriter son of famed stage actress Laurette Taylor, turned up at one of the parties, and Myrna found him fiercely attractive. But her dear friend Natalie Visart claimed him for her own, sensing the moment she laid eyes on him that he would become her husband. Visart and Taylor, breezy author of the screenplay for
Top Hat
and the book for Cole Porter’s
Gay Divorcée
, soon married and began a family, though Natalie’s involvement with Mitchell Leisen didn’t end when she became Mrs. Taylor. Myrna remained close to the Taylors and their daughter.

During the brief interlude when she was unattached, Myrna was seen out and about in Los Angeles with the Viennese-born actor Helmut Dantine, who played the German pilot in
Mrs. Miniver
. Twelve years younger than Myrna, intelligent and darkly handsome, he provided a short-term diversion, and fodder for the gossip columns, but Myrna wasn’t really interested in him. She had already embarked on a serious relationship with Gene Markey.

The screenwriter, novelist, and 20th Century–Fox producer Gene Markey is most often mentioned today in connection with the many beautiful women he bedded and wedded, but it wasn’t just women who found him hard to resist. Trained as a cartoonist, he could charm a child with an improvised drawing or story. A popular companion, he was a sailing, drinking, and Naval Intelligence buddy of John Ford and a pal of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The entertaining, quicksilver, and debonair Markey was a perennial favorite at parties. His stepdaughter, Diana Anderson (Joan Bennett’s daughter by her first marriage), speaks adoringly of him. Markey also continued to be one of the best friends of Arthur Hornblow Jr. They tried to have lunch together once a week when both were in Los Angeles.

In becoming involved with Gene Markey, Myrna remained at least a peripheral part of Arthur’s world. Arthur’s romance with his soon-to-be second wife, Leonora “Bubbles” Schinasi Morris, was in full bloom, though for now they lived on opposite coasts. Leonora wrote to him from Park Avenue about running into Captain Markey, at the time the head of a Naval Intelligence unit, one night in New York, at the nightclub “21”:

I heard the unmistakable tones of Captain Markey, screaming out for all to hear, “Bubbles, my pie, are you going to pass Daddy by?” Needless to report, I fell into his manly arms with a cry of glee, and after much hugging realized he was with a lady, Miss Loy. We greeted each other cheerfully, heartily told the other how beautiful she was looking and were little ladies. I stopped at the table to say goodnight and Gene made me stay with them for a minute. We had much merry talk. Gene, never a man to mince words, asked for you immediately, told me how much you missed me and what a noble fellow you were. Myrna smiled sweetly and said she agreed and we all grinned at each other in high good humor and suddenly burst out laughing. Gene went on to say that Myrna liked me so much. “I like her,” I said, “I always have.” [Arthur and Myrna had visited teenaged Leonora and her mother at their New York home in 1935.] “I don’t approve of it,” said Gene, “it doesn’t go well with my plot and plans for you two to get on so well, you can’t have Myrna and Arthur,” said he, “you’ll have to choose between them.” “I will,” I said, “just the way you have, Captain darling.” We talked away blithely and contentedly. Myrna didn’t talk much, mainly because the poor girl didn’t have a chance to open her mouth, as neither Gene nor I are the silent types. And besides, Myrna listens so well. I promised her that I would phone her before I left. They both said to send you love, individually and together, when I wrote. . . . So you can imagine the cozy family scene. Both Gene and I agreed that if all concerned, and all the people they had been married to, married just once more, we could have a complete colony.

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Leonora kept her competitive feelings about Myrna under wraps when she found herself sitting next to her at a dinner that included Marc Connelly and the Ira Gershwins. In her letters to Arthur, however, the gloves came off. At dinner, she told him, “Myrna said five sentences, I counted.” She scrutinized every detail of Myrna’s clothing and accessories, commenting to Arthur that Myrna carried “a wonderful cigarette case of woven gold” and looked “very thin and beautiful in black with a black hat” but with a tacky bunch of fake flowers pinned to the pocket of her dress. “I thought to myself, ‘your once husband Mr. A. Hornblow would have removed that in short order.’ ” She further reported, “My mink compared most favorably with hers in colour, texture, style and so forth.”
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Collier Young, an intimate of both Gene and Arthur, told Leonora that he had seen Myrna the previous night and that “she was dewy-eyed over the gallant captain.” Collier further reported that “poor Gene wonders aloud if his current romance will affect his profound friendship for you [Arthur].” Leonora assured Arthur that she felt secure about his devotion, “that I cheerfully presumed that you were harboring no candle of regret and undying love for Miss Loy, that I would take on anyone my weight who said that you were, that neither Myrna nor Gene need worry!”
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At the conclusion of the war Gene, who would attain the rank of commodore in the U.S. Navy, was stationed in Washington, D.C., where Myrna made frequent stops to visit patients at Walter Reed and nearby Bethesda Naval Hospital. As Myrna got to know and be known in the capital, her name started appearing in the Washington society pages, which noted, for example, that at a party to benefit convalescent soldiers, “Myrna Loy shared the spotlight with Mrs. James Doolittle, wife of the Tokyo-raiding Doolittle.” The gossip columnists also speculated about a possible forthcoming third marriage for Miss Loy. Borrowing the lingo of a popular song of the day, one wrote, “ ‘Is you is or is you ain’t?’ That’s what Washington wants to know from Myrna Loy and Gene Markey. Is the lovely Myrna married to the Naval Captain? Or are those luncheons at the Mayflower, dinners at the Statler, or Army and Navy Club just friendly?”
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Washington’s Hotel Carlton became another of Myrna’s perches. It was there that she learned, by overhearing a man in a suit who had just emerged from a car, that “Germany has surrendered” (
BB
, 189). The horrendous war in Europe was at last coming to an end. Roosevelt had died in April 1945, just the previous month, so for Myrna the jubilation was somewhat muted. Harry Truman now occupied the White House.

When Truman was still vice president, Myrna had met him during one of her visits to the Roosevelt White House. She met him again at a charity show soon after he became commander in chief, and she liked his gutsy, forthright, and unpretentious style. But he didn’t come close to inspiring the hero worship she reserved for FDR.

With the war in Europe concluded, a new political era under way in the United States, an enamored Gene Markey at her side, and dramatic plans for restarting her film career after having lived on the East Coast for three years, Myrna Loy headed back to the City of Angels.

CHAPTER 15

Postwar

After an association of thirteen years, Myrna Loy and MGM parted company without ceremony soon after she returned to the Los Angeles area in 1945. Already nursing a bundle of grievances from the past, she protested loudly when Louis B. Mayer refused to let her go to England on loan to Noel Coward to appear as Elvira in a David Lean–directed screen version of
Blithe Spirit
. Myrna believed she had been born to play Elvira, the ghost wife who haunts her husband’s second marriage. She charged that Mayer was holding her back, chaining her to MGM when he had no other good role in mind for her. “Do you want me to wait around until I’m dead?” she asked him. She still had one year to go on her contract but sensed she must establish her independence right away, before her career lost any more momentum.

When Leland Hayward first requested her release, Mayer said no. Myrna decided to speak to her boss on her own. The manipulative mogul, near to tears, accused her of ingratitude for all the studio had done for her and assured her, “I couldn’t care more about you if you were my own horse” (
BB
, 192–93). Mayer loved his thoroughbreds, so this was intended as a high compliment. When Myrna agreed to return to MGM now and then to make an occasional
Thin Man
picture, he relented and let her go. As it turned out, she would come back only once, to make
Song of the Thin Man
, the swan song to the series.

The
Los Angeles Times
’ Philip K. Scheuer rightly saw her rupture with MGM as indicative of a major transition in Hollywood. “[It] was more than the amicable dissolution of just another star-producer contract. It marked the end of an era which, beginning in the Thirsty Thirties, had drenched the screen with slick stories of marital infidelity (and, much less frequently, fidelity).” Screen wives, both faithful and straying, “had broken away one by one. Norma Shearer, to virtual retirement, Joan Crawford to another studio and a hoped-for fresh start, Greta Garbo to be alone. Miss Loy was the last of the old guard to seek release.”
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Not only had MGM wives been breaking ranks, but Hollywood actors in general were also asserting their independence, preferring to freelance rather than be bound by long-term studio contracts. The star system itself had lost sheen. Cary Grant jumped ship, refusing to allow any single studio to control his professional destiny and shunning further multiyear contracts after his Paramount obligation termed out in 1936. Irene Dunne had abandoned RKO in 1935, and the California Court of Appeals had backed Olivia de Havilland’s recent suit against Warner Bros., affirming an actor’s right to refuse bondage of indefinite duration or unwanted assigned roles. A studio could no longer require a player to work beyond the seven-year term of a contract.

Asked by Scheuer what kind of roles she would look for now that she had her freedom, Myrna replied that she didn’t seek glamour parts. “I’ve got to trip over a rug every so often. My sense of humor won’t let me wear a long face—and neither will my freckles.”
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She soon announced that her first picture as a freelancer would be a period piece for Universal,
So Goes My Love
, a charming but less than earth-shattering venture that few remember. It cast her as the pretty, nurturing wife of a madcap inventor (played by Don Ameche) in Brooklyn at the threshold of the twentieth century. The Travis Banton costumes steal the show.

Although she wanted to avoid any professional commitment that would bind her as tightly as her contract with MGM had, she did sign an agreement with RKO tying her to that studio for three years, making one picture a year. Soon after, she accepted Sam Goldwyn’s invitation to appear in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, which would be distributed by RKO.
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A landmark film that became the biggest commercial success of the decade,
The Best Years of Our Lives
still defines the postwar era, and it gave Myrna Loy the chance to shine in what she considered her best piece of work.
Best Years
came into being because of a
Time
magazine article about marines home on furlough after years overseas who worry aloud about how they will be received. Frances Goldwyn, moved by the plight of the anxious returning servicemen, told her husband, Sam, he should make a picture on the subject. After mulling it over, Goldwyn agreed that at a time when millions of Americans who had served in the military were being demobilized, such a film would strike a chord. He commissioned the journalist and novelist MacKinlay Kantor to write a novel based on the homecoming-soldiers theme. The resulting book, an extended narrative poem written in free verse and weighing in at four hundred–plus pages, was published in 1945 as
Glory for Me
. Robert Sherwood, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright who had served in the Roosevelt administration as a speechwriter and director of the overseas Office of War Information, agreed to adapt Kantor’s book for the screen.
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Because of Arthur Hornblow’s long association with Goldwyn productions, Myrna knew Sam Goldwyn quite well, though she hadn’t appeared in a Goldwyn picture since
Arrowsmith
in 1931. To her the Goldwyn name spelled quality, taste, and independence, but she was well aware that Sam could be extremely difficult and often clashed with his directors. He and William Wyler, slated to direct
The Best Years of Our Lives
, respected one another but constantly collided, unable to agree about whose judgment should prevail or who deserved plaudits for a collaborative success. They began working together in 1936 and had already locked horns during five previous productions.

At a dinner party that included Robert Sherwood, Gene Markey, and Frances Goldwyn, Goldwyn offered Myrna the role of Milly Stephenson, explaining that the part would not be large or glamorous. Instead of designer clothes, she would wear dresses bought off a department store rack and worn for weeks before shooting, so that they wouldn’t look too new. She would be playing a woman old enough to have an adult daughter, Teresa Wright, who was actually in her late twenties but was meant to appear about nineteen. (Olivia de Havilland, who turned down the role of Milly, at age thirty would have been far too young.) Goldwyn emphasized that this movie would not be a star vehicle but an ensemble piece with a distinguished cast and a prestigious director, Wyler, who very much wanted her to play Milly, wife of banker Al Stephenson, a returning infantry sergeant who would be portrayed by Fredric March. Loy’s long association with wife roles, her age (forty-one), and her natural, understated acting style, recommended her as the ideal Milly.

Wyler’s painstaking directing style stood at the opposite pole from that of “One Take” Woody Van Dyke. A perfectionist who took his time, Wyler would shoot forty takes if he felt them necessary to achieve exactly what he wanted. Striving for unadorned realism, he relied heavily on the honesty of Gregg Toland’s crisp black-and-white photography and on Toland’s mastery of deep focus, which allowed the viewer to see three planes of action—foreground, background, and middle—going on simultaneously. Wyler also depended on an actor’s intuition, shooting long scenes for maximum continuity and refraining from offering line readings of his own. He described his directing approach for this film as similar to a theater director’s. Prior to shooting a major scene, “we would spend the morning sitting around a table, reading the script, much as it is done in the early stages of theater rehearsal.” Before she experienced Wyler’s methods for herself, Myrna was apprehensive. She told Goldwyn she’d heard (from Bette Davis, for one) that Wyler was a sadist. “That isn’t true,” Goldwyn insisted. “He’s just a very mean fellow” (
BB
, 197).
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