Myrna Loy (58 page)

The goal of appearing on the Broadway stage proved elusive. Alan Pakula’s 1962 production of James Kirkwood’s autobiographical
There Must Be a Pony
was scheduled to open at the Cort Theater in Manhattan but never did.
Dear Love
, a two-character play by James Kilty that set out to do for the letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning what Kilty’s
Dear Liar
had done for George Bernard Shaw’s correspondence with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, toured all over the country but closed in New Haven, never negotiating the leap into the big time. A planned production of Alan Ayckbourn’s
Relatively Speaking
, retooled for Broadway and costarring Ray Milland, failed to get off the ground, although Myrna did appear in a touring production of the play in 1978, her final year on the stage.

Myrna Loy’s most enduring and wide-reaching stage success began in 1964 when she took the role of Mrs. Banks, a suburban widow, in the national tour of Mike Nichols’s production of Neil Simon’s
Barefoot in the Park
. Mildred Natwick played Mrs. Banks in the Broadway version and would again in the 1967 movie. The play focuses on a couple of newlyweds adjusting to life in a bare-bones walk-up apartment in New York City. Mrs. Banks is the unworldly mother of the kooky bride, Corie. With a cast that initially featured Richard Benjamin as the young husband, Paul; Joan Van Ark as Corie; and Sandor Szabo as an oddball neighbor, the
Barefoot
tour lasted more than two years and included bookings in Central City, Colorado; San Francisco; Boston; Toronto; Honolulu; and Washington. It played four sold-out weeks at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood and seven months at the Blackstone in Chicago.

The demanding tour kept a breathless pace and sometimes necessitated stopovers of only a few days. Leone Rosson met the company at many venues, helping with driving, publicity, and all kinds of personal services for her boss. A congenial woman with an intuitive feel for Myrna’s needs, she would replenish supplies of hose and cosmetics, for example, knowing everything about the sizes Myrna wore and her favorite brands and colors. She freed Myrna to immerse herself in theater while at the same time getting acquainted with regions that were new to her. “I never really got a chance to see the U.S. before,” she told Bob Thomas. “During all those years at MGM I was working so hard I never got a chance to travel. Now I’m making up for it.”
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Richard Benjamin recalls that wherever they were playing, one scenario kept repeating itself. The tightly knit company would go out for dinner after a performance. Inevitably, a distinguished-looking gentleman—a different one in every town, but always with gray hair—would approach Myrna politely. He would apologize for intruding, and then tell her, “I had to tell you that I have always loved you.”
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The
Barefoot
tour allowed Myrna to reconnect with many strands of her past. Although he never came to see the show, perhaps because he had grown quite deaf, William Powell sent her American Beauty roses wherever she had an opening. Teresa Wright came to a performance in Chicago and Rosalind Russell to one in Hollywood. Judy Garland, who never worked in a movie with Myrna but who befriended her at MGM and used to phone her at strange hours of the morning, turned up at the Huntington Hartford. Adlai Stevenson visited backstage at Chicago’s Blackstone Theater. Terry Hornblow, now a practicing neurologist with a wife and a young family, attended a show, as did some of Myrna’s cousins from Montana. Jeanette MacDonald turned up at a matinee. In San Francisco Myrna saw old friends who decades earlier had tried to help Jean Harlow, the Saxton Popes. Roddy McDowall sent her funny, affectionate postcards along the way. He teasingly called her “Fu” because of her part in
The Mask of Fu Manchu
, a film he once screened for friends at his home. Political allies welcomed her. In Kansas City she received a message from Harry Truman, inviting her to visit him and the Truman Library in Independence. She did, and found him frail and somewhat forlorn. While playing in Washington, she was invited to have tea at the White House with Lady Bird Johnson and lunch at the Senate with Mike Mansfield.

Myrna considered Mike Nichols a genius. She recalled that at first, during
Barefoot
rehearsals, Nora Charles “got a little in the way [of Mrs. Banks]. I felt that audiences would not accept me as a suburban matron who had not been anywhere.” Having a hard time making Myrna Loy appear frumpy, Nichols agreed to let her develop the part as she wished. “We discussed it and although I was reluctant and fearful at first, I soon found that by stressing her [Mrs. Banks’s] neuroses, her fear of being unloved, the woman became a very real character.”
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The only major snag came with cast changes in Chicago, which to Myrna felt like the breakup of a family. Richard Benjamin left to undertake directing a production of
Barefoot
in London. And Christina Crawford, Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter, replaced Joan Van Ark. Initially, Myrna was delighted to find herself in the same cast with the daughter of her ally from the days of
Pretty Ladies
. She hoped Joan Crawford, still a friend, would come to see the show. That never happened because Joan and Christina were not on good terms, and Myrna found Christina anything but a team player. “Christina wouldn’t stand where she was supposed to, she said her line any way she wanted to, she upset everyone in the cast, especially me.”
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To complicate matters, Christina became romantically involved with the stage manager, Harvey Medlinski, whom she would marry. Medlinski allowed Christina to do as she wished onstage. Myrna asked Richard Benjamin to come back briefly from London, hoping he could intervene. He came but to no avail.

Myrna summoned her new agent, Robert Lantz, to Chicago. After the 1962 breakup of MCA she had briefly worked with the William Morris agency but soon signed with the cultured, Berlin-born, New York–based Lantz, a highly regarded independent agent who also represented, among many others, Elizabeth Taylor, Roddy McDowall, and Mike Nichols. Lantz arrived at the Blackstone, with Neil Simon in tow. After both saw Christina Crawford perform, she was fired. Christina blamed Myrna, and the breach between them only worsened after the 1978 publication of
Mommie Dearest
, her tattletale memoir. Myrna always defended Joan Crawford and would never put her down. Despite Crawford’s drinking problem, she and Joan continued to see one another for an occasional lunch in New York and to speak regularly on the phone. Following Crawford’s death in 1977, Myrna attended two memorials for her, one in New York and a second, requiring a special trip to Los Angeles, that was organized by George Cukor and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After the one on the West Coast Myrna wrote to Cukor, “Sorry to hear we were so rude to Christina at the Memorial—isn’t it shocking!” She had refused to talk to Christina or even to be present in the same room with her just prior to the Los Angeles tribute, at which Myrna Loy spoke as Joan Crawford’s oldest friend.
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Despite the turbulence of the Chicago run, the Blackstone Theater production of
Barefoot in the Park
enjoyed immense popularity and yielded Myrna a prize, the Sarah Siddons Award, presented annually for an outstanding performance in a Chicago theatrical production. Carol Channing and Dorothy Lamour were among those who came to cheer at the awards banquet at the Ambassador West Hotel, and the ever-devoted William Powell sent a telegram of congratulations.
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After the Mike Nichols production had run its course, Myrna toured a new version of
Barefoot in the Park
directed by a New England woman who would direct Myrna in future tours of other plays, Burry Fredrik. Altogether, Myrna Loy would portray Mrs. Banks close to a thousand times. The role became a mainstay, a kind of financial security blanket.

Between touring productions of
Barefoot in the Park
, Myrna’s mother, Della Williams, died of pneumonia at age eighty-six, after a fall. For the last years of her life she had been living in a nursing home in the San Fernando Valley, close to the home of her problematic son, David. Chronically at the brink of financial ruin after losing his Hughes Aircraft job, David remained a thorn in his sister’s side. He caused her no end of worry and grief, angering her by signing checks on Della’s bank account when Della was seriously ill. On the day of Della’s death Leone Rosson wrote in her diary, “Myrna called at 1:15. Had a row with David about Della. David called 10:15 [to say] that Della had passed away” (Oct. 6, 1966).

Della was cremated in North Hollywood, and Myrna carried her ashes to Helena, where a funeral took place, and Della’s remains were laid to rest in Forestvale Cemetery, beside the grave of her long-dead husband. Myrna loved the site, “full of worn crosses and moss-covered stones” (
BB
, 211). She felt that the reality of death was acknowledged there, not denied as it is in a place like Forest Lawn. Her brother, David, did not go to Helena with Myrna; her lifelong friend Betty Black did. After the graveside rites Betty returned to Southern California, but Myrna lingered a while in Montana, visiting relatives in Great Falls and old haunts, including Della’s portion of the Williams ranch.

At home in New York Myrna fashioned her own family. During warm weather months she visited the Handmans in Nantucket and the Robert Lantzes on Fire Island. She went every year to Farmington, Connecticut, to spend the Christmas holiday season with Terry Hornblow; his wife, Doris; and their three children. Doris would drive into Manhattan to pick her up. Like her father, and like Nora Charles, Myrna loved gift giving and always arrived piled high with packages. She was a relaxed, low-maintenance guest who would pitch in with meal preparation, read to the kids, and lounge around in her silky, quilted robe, her hair in curlers, with a turban covering them. Once some neighbors gave a party in her honor, and she put on makeup, heels, and what she called “lady clothes” and transformed herself into the glamorous Myrna Loy, working the room and charming everyone in it. In private Terry called her “Minnie,” which had also been Arthur’s name for her, and the children called her “Aunt Myrna.”
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According to Terry Hornblow, Myrna continued to keep different parts of her life compartmentalized, completely separate. He didn’t get to know the Handmans, Boaty Boatwright, or Estelle Linzer, all members of Myrna’s Manhattan inner circle. He never met Roddy McDowall, who in her later years served as another of Myrna’s surrogate sons. Roddy phoned her frequently, squired Myrna around, invited her over, checked up on her when she was ill. He wrote to her when she went on tour, telling her how much he loved her, sending her a kiss. A generous friend to many, the gay, British-born Roddy had been a child actor and, in addition to becoming a skilled photographer, was a serious, knowledgeable film buff with a deep appreciation for Hollywood’s Golden Age. He and Myrna worked together, on both the movie
Midnight Lace
and a 1974 telefilm,
The Elevator
. He collected films and used to invite friends to screenings at his New York home on Central Park West. He valued Myrna Loy’s achievements as a movie actress more than all of her four husbands put together.

Through Roddy, Myrna met Sybil Burton and her then-husband Richard, who because of Myrna’s Welsh heritage liked to claim her as one of their own. After Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor, Sybil remarried and became a business partner to Roddy McDowall. Sybil opened the trendy New York disco called Arthur, where she and Roddy once, according to Leone Rosson’s diary, hosted a party for Myrna. When Sybil had a daughter, Amy, by second husband Jordan Christopher, Myrna became that child’s godmother. She was also godmother to Boaty Boat-wright’s daughter Kara Baker, born in England. Myrna went to London for her christening.

Myrna had long enjoyed a special rapport with young people. She considered Terry and Doris Hornblow’s three kids her grandchildren. She identified with the college students who supported Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the Democratic nomination in 1968, who joined what was called “the children’s crusade.” She shared their antipathy to the war in Vietnam and said that if she’d followed through on her plans to attend the Democratic convention in Chicago, she surely would have been arrested during the violent antiwar demonstrations. But she had to cancel her Chicago plans because at the time of the convention she was filming
The April Fools
in Studio City. She told the TV interviewer James Day that she was becoming more radical as she aged.
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Natalie Visart and Dwight Taylor’s daughter Laurel, a high school student during the late 1960s, considered Myrna family and, like so many others, called her “Aunt Myrna.” Laurel recalled being “completely intoxicated by the air of female independence [Myrna] exuded” when visiting the Taylors. Myrna stood out as “the only woman of my parents’ social circle who seemed utterly complete and sufficient without a man. I remember she had this wonderful posture that was elegant and Princess Grace–like, but she was also like a tree rooted in the earth, nothing was going to blow her over. To me, she was very much part of the times, absorbed by politics and the efforts to stop the Vietnam War.” Laurel had volunteered for the Eugene McCarthy campaign and had also joined a youth group at Ethical Culture. Myrna, she recalls, “liked to talk to me about issues as though I were an equal, encouraging my first ventures into liberal politics.” When Laurel later had a baby out of wedlock, Myrna backed her decision to keep the baby and confided that she had been unable to have children. Laurel, a new mother, dropped out of college for a while and moved close to her parents. Myrna “enjoyed my beautiful baby and my Mom’s delight in being a grandmother, [but] she took me aside and told me I had to get back to my studies.” After Laurel returned to school and won a traveling fellowship after graduation, “Myrna was very proud of me and invited [baby] Chloe and me to stay with her in New York after we disembarked.”
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