Myrna Loy (52 page)

William Wyler and John Huston had approached her on the
Mr. Blandings
set, asking her to help in establishing the anti-HUAC Committee for the First Amendment. Myrna attended the crowded founders’ meeting in the living room of Ira Gershwin, along with her
Mr. Blandings
coplayer, Melvyn Douglas. Dore Schary, whose company, RKO, was producing
Mr. Blandings
, had testified at the Washington hearings, explaining to the committee that he would not knowingly employ a subversive but that when he hired someone to work on a movie, what he looked for was “the person best fitted to do the job.” He argued that the communist threat to the movie industry was being blown out of proportion. When Schary came back on the
Mr. Blandings
set, he said about the hearings, “A person could get killed out there.” According to Melvyn Douglas, Cary Grant responded by excusing himself to get a glass of water. “Whenever a serious subject would come up, Cary would pull back.” He simply didn’t want to get involved.
²⁸

In addition to funding the Hollywood protesters’ flight to Washington, the Committee for the First Amendment also financed two ABC radio broadcasts jointly titled
Hollywood Fights Back
. Myrna participated in the second one, taking her place among the stellar cast of Hollywood players and directors. Several Democratic senators and prominent members of the arts community (Thomas Mann among them) participated, and all of them read statements over the air denouncing the congressional hearings as a threat to fundamental American freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. “It’s one thing to say we’re not good actors,” listeners heard from an earnest Judy Garland. “It’s another to say we’re not good Americans. We resent that.” Burt Lancaster proclaimed, “You can’t dump a bucket of red paint on Hollywood.” The bandleader Artie Shaw warned, “Better get off the bandstand, Mr. Thomas, nobody’s dancing!” Reading words that were probably scripted by Norman Corwin, Myrna Loy said, “We question the right of Congress to ask any man what he thinks on political issues. We think a lot of our freedom.”
²⁹

Both William Wyler and Gene Kelly made specific mention of
The Best Years of Our Lives
during the
Hollywood Fights Back
broadcasts. Prior to the hearings, congressional members of HUAC were mentioning
The Best Years
as one of several films guilty of covertly dispensing communist, or at least anti-American, propaganda. During the actual hearings no one on the committee supplied a list of tainted movies; perhaps they feared lawsuits. But
Variety
reported there was a secret list, and
Best Years
was on it. One friendly witness characterized as “a Communist device” the depiction onscreen of a banker unsympathetic to giving loans to GIs; he didn’t name his target, but anyone who had seen
The Best Years of Our Lives
would recognize the reference.
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Over the airwaves on
Hollywood Fights Back
Wyler protested that in today’s Hollywood, “I wouldn’t be allowed to make
The Best Years of Our Lives
as it was made a year ago. They [HUAC investigators] are making decent people afraid to express their opinions.” Gene Kelly asked the radio audience, “Did you happen to see
The Best Years of Our Lives?
Did you like it? Were you subverted by it? Did it make you un-American? Did you come out of the movie with the desire to overthrow the government?” The questions were designed to make the Red baiters appear absurd.

In a letter to Myrna, Wyler wrote, “It is unfortunate that just six months after it took our industry’s most distinguished honors,
The Best Years of Our Lives
is being degraded by the Thomas Committee to the point that it may be considered a disgrace . . . to our entire country.”
³¹

J. Parnell Thomas abruptly adjourned the hearings at the end of October, but by that time the blacklist had become inevitable. Congress cited for contempt the ten unfriendly witnesses—one producer, two directors, and the rest writers—who had declined to state whether they were communists. Terrified that the negative publicity would destroy the film industry at a time when movie attendance was already declining, a secret meeting of producers convened in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria. In what would become known as the Waldorf Statement, the producers turned against the Hollywood Ten, declaring that the studios in Hollywood would henceforth refuse to hire known communists and would fire those now employed. “Film Industry Rules ‘No Jobs’ for Reds; Will Fire or Suspend the Cited Ten.” Dore Schary went along with the producers’ majority decision, even though he had privately opposed it and had announced at the hearings his policy of disregarding politics and hiring the person best qualified for a job. RKO promptly fired two of the Hollywood Ten, Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott, the director and producer who had worked under Schary on
Crossfire
, a film noir about anti-Semitism. Myrna bought into Schary’s argument that he’d had no choice.
³²

Myrna didn’t believe she would face blacklisting, although her name continued to show up from time to time on lists of “Red appeasers” in Hollywood. And it’s possible some producers put her out of the running for parts in their films because they didn’t like her outspoken views. The retraction she won from the
Hollywood Reporter
gave her reason to trust in her ability to fight back. During the HUAC hearings she wrote to Wyler, “I dare them to ask me to testify!”
³³

CHAPTER 16

Breaking Away

Even though she received no Oscar or nomination for her work in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, Myrna’s participation in the much-honored, widely distributed picture garnished her prestige, jacked up her salary, and boosted demand for her presence onscreen.

But she could still take a role that did nothing for her status. For the fun of it, rather than as a career move, she made a cameo appearance in
The Senator Was Indiscreet
, a farcical political satire directed by George S. Kaufman and featuring white-haired William Powell playing a dim-witted, philandering, blowhard U.S. senator who runs for president but winds up exiled to Hawaii. Clad in a Hawaiian-print dress, with flowers in her hair, as the senator’s previously unseen wife she utters a single line and flashes the familiar upturned nose and crinkly smile in the last frame. So ended the fourteenth and final screen mating of Myrna Loy and William Powell. For this lark of a performance her payment was a new Cadillac.

The satire in
The Senator Was Indiscreet
now seems so broad that it couldn’t offend anyone, but Joseph Breen tried to get the film scrapped, and Senator Joseph McCarthy branded it “traitorous and un-American.”
¹

Cary Grant became Loy’s leading man in two films owed under her three-picture contract with RKO. Since they last worked together in 1935 in
Wings in the Dark
, which awarded top billing to Myrna Loy, Grant had become a huge star, outranked only by Bing Crosby among Hollywood leading men, according to
Variety
. He commanded at least $150,000 per picture and could pick his own vehicles. For
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
he was paid $12,500 a week, compared to Myrna’s $5,000. A shrewd businessman with a reputation for watching every penny, he began functioning as his own agent after Frank Vincent died during the filming of
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
.
²

That movie got off to a rocky start. Myrna, cast as an unmarried and austere lady judge, had twice asked if she could redo her first scene, and the young director, Irving Reis, readily agreed. The persnickety Grant saw this as evidence of favoritism, blew his top, and walked off the set. He objected that Reis lacked the requisite credentials, being too green in the ways of comedy, and he further complained to Schary that Myrna was “getting away with murder” (
BB
, 204). Now it was Irving Reis’s turn to show temperament, by walking out. When he returned after a few days, he and Schary agreed to split directing duties. Schary would work closely with the actors, while Reis limited himself to scene blocking and camera setups.
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Shirley Temple, who at age eighteen had been improbably cast as Myrna Loy’s younger sister and ward, also acted up. Grant threatened to have her fired after he caught her entertaining cast and crew with her Cary Grant imitation. She apologized. Reluctant to share the limelight with another actress, Temple sneaked old, spent flashbulbs into their cameras when photographers tried to take publicity pictures of Myrna. Myrna consulted Gene Markey on what to do about her costar’s bratty behavior, since Gene had produced several Shirley Temple movies at 20th Century–Fox and knew the former child star well. He advised Myrna to send Shirley flowers, which Myrna promptly did (
BB
, 205). That seems to have cleared the way to civility.
⁴

Up against a director and two costars who couldn’t seem to settle down, Myrna displayed what Cary Grant described as “the calmness of a Buddha.” Tolerant of his “moods, fretting and fussing,” she lost her cool only on the rare occasion when she flubbed a line, which prompted her to retire to the side of the set and pace up and down at a rapid clip while muttering, “ ‘Oh, shucks!’ That is wild, wicked language for Myrna.”
⁵

In creating his Academy Award–winning script for
Bachelor
, Sidney Sheldon stinted on the role of the lady judge, handing all the choice comedy morsels to Cary Grant’s character, Dick Nugent, a dashing artist in his forties saddled with the task of dating an aggressively ardent high school girl (Temple) who sees him as her knight in shining armor. As a would-be teenager, Grant drives a jalopy, rolls up his trouser cuffs, spouts jive-talk, and competes for trophies at a high school picnic, trying to sprint while balancing a potato on a spoon. His acrobatic deftness and exuberance carry the film. Loy’s Judge Margaret Turner, on the other hand, never gets a chance to charm us. She morphs from a forbidding cold fish into an alluring, seductively gowned love object for Grant, but that’s about it. “For the most part she is merely a backdrop,” wrote the savvy critic for the
New York Herald Tribune
.
⁶

Since
The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer
earned $5,550,000, RKO and its partner, Selznick Releasing Organization, immediately rushed Cary Grant and Myrna Loy into another picture,
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
. Shot in just fifty days, compared to the seventy-three required to complete
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
, the
Mr. Blandings
production ran smoothly, without major dust-ups among cast or crew members, although there were plenty of challenges for the crew. Duplicate outdoor sets had to be built, one showing the excavation site of the rickety old house in Connecticut that Jim and Muriel Blandings hurriedly buy and then have to tear down, the other the construction of the new house that replaces it. The landscape of rural Connecticut had to be recreated, complete with make-believe majestic oaks, at the Hunter Ranch (now Malibu Creek State Park) in the Santa Monica Mountains.
⁷

Based on a best-selling novel by Eric Hodgins, an executive at Time, Inc., and a consultant on the movie,
Mr. Blandings
depended on rapport with an audience all too familiar with the postwar housing crunch. Jim Blandings (Cary Grant), a writer of advertising copy, makes $15,000 a year, we’re told, ten thousand less than the amount his character earned in the novel. Screenwriters Norman Panama and Melvin Frank guessed that the average American would resent rather than sympathize with the problems of a family trying to make do with $25,000 a year. Since the average American household lived on less than $4,000 a year in 1948, it’s hard to believe that the cutback to a salary of $15,000 a year made much of a difference in audience appeal. RKO under Schary was drowning in red ink and
Mr. Blandings
made a disappointing showing at the box office, losing $225,000.
⁸

The film opens with wordless scenes of rush hour chaos in Manhattan, narrated by the Blandingses’ best friend and lawyer, Bill Cole (a sardonic Melvyn Douglas). We move to the workday morning rush in the Blandings household, where a family of four “modern cliff dwellers” is trying to function in a Manhattan apartment that’s far too small for them. “Cary was terribly funny when he was frustrated,” Myrna would comment (
BB
, 214), and these city apartment scenes supply him symphonies of frustration. Jim Blandings’s socks have been moved from a dresser drawer to a basket high up in an overcrowded closet. He has to compete for his turn in the shower and to fight for a piece of the bathroom mirror when he attempts to shave. Pillboxes rain on him when he opens the door of a medicine chest. Everyone’s grumpy at breakfast (served by Louise Beavers as the maid, Gussie), and the two daughters, totally joyless schoolgirls, attack their father by spouting platitudes against the advertising business that they’ve learned at their progressive private school. Jim vetoes Muriel’s proposal that they spend $7,000 redecorating their cramped apartment; why spend money fixing up a place you don’t own? When a brochure proclaiming the joys of country life in Connecticut falls into Jim’s hands, he jumps at the bait.

In Connecticut Jim and Muriel prove equally clueless about the nuts and bolts of home building and equally unrealistic about how much money their dream house will cost. They supply their architect (Reginald Denny) with a lengthy wish list. They want a sewing room, a room for plants, a built-in bar, a playroom, multiple closets, and bathrooms. “I refuse to endanger the health of my children in a house with less than four bathrooms,” says the rather passive and dim, but appealing, Muriel, whose big scene finds her trying to describe to baffled house painters exactly which subtle shade of color she wants for each room. Only their friend Bill Cole has a grasp of market values, and only he keeps an eye on what the Blandingses can and can’t afford. But Jim, whose job is threatened because he can’t come up with the right slogan to promote Wham Ham, becomes jealous of Bill, suspecting that his friend and his wife are deceiving him by conducting a secret affair. The jealousy theme isn’t in the novel, and
Variety
complained that it neither added laughs nor advanced the story.
⁹