Myrna Loy (8 page)

She taught many of her California classes outdoors. Students danced in bare feet, draped in flowing, Grecian-style garments that left the legs uncovered. To puritans this near nakedness was scandalous. Proper young ladies were supposed to fully clothe their bodies in public. But the definition of feminine propriety was changing fast in these postwar years, as skirts got shorter, corsets disappeared, and waistlines dropped, or vanished altogether. St. Denis and Duncan, both American New Women, were at the cutting edge of female dress reform, and Myrna, who didn’t need or own a corset, went right along with them. Both St. Denis and Duncan promoted health-enhancing gambols in fresh air, and no one ever caught either one of them in the sort of constricting, waist-cinching, high-collared shirtwaist and floor-length skirt that Della had worn for a family portrait just a few years back.
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Della, responsive to the coupling of the aesthetic with healthful outdoor living, approved Ruth St. Denis as the right dancing teacher for Myrna. Her friend, the impresario Lynden Behymer, served as manager of the Denishawn Company.

An actress as well as a dancer, St. Denis created elaborately costumed dance productions that blurred the line between drama and dance. Each of her dances focused on a central character, usually danced by St. Denis herself. Known for her poise, flowing movements, and the precision of her gestures, she choreographed dances that, aided by atmospheric sets, lighting, and costumes of her own design, evoked subtle moods and a spirit of place—whether China, India, Egypt, Japan, or Java.

Her training in the Delsarte method of expression guided her. François Delsarte, a French music and dance teacher who died in 1871, developed a system of “scientific,” body-based expression and pantomime that was much in vogue in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dramatic circles. The catalogue for summer 1918 at the Denishawn School lists a class in “Dramatic gesture based on the system of François Delsarte.” Delsarte exercises, which American actors in training rehearsed, tried to match a performer’s role in a scene with an appropriate, individual way of moving, standing, or emoting; each character had to find her or his own rhythm and, for each emotion, a corresponding gesture. Appropriateness, control, and relaxation were key. Myrna, who as a screen actress would excel at timing, restraint, and mastery of subtle nonverbal cues such as the deft shrug of a shoulder or arching of an eyebrow, learned her Delsarte gestures indirectly, by watching the work of actors experienced in his method, and via Ruth St. Denis, with whom she studied. She was taught how to maintain the erect posture and queenly bearing that became part of her signature. She learned pantomime, which would serve her well as an actress in silent film. She also was shown exactly how to sustain a still position, for posing in the Delsarte tradition was essential to Denishawn training. “If dancing is essentially the music of motion,” Ted Shawn claimed in an article he wrote for a health magazine, “it is also true that there is action even in a perfectly still position.” Ruth St. Denis herself taught Myrna the “Water Lily” pose, and Myrna in turn taught it to her friend Lou.
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Myrna and her friends sometimes snuck over the fence into the Culver City Goldwyn studio and practiced posing there, snapping photographs of each other in front of standing movie sets (
BB, 26
). All this studied attitudinizing enhanced her readiness for both the still and the movie camera, a few years down the line. In the 1926 film
The Exquisite Sinner
, produced at MGM and directed by Josef von Sternberg, as Myrna Loy she played a Living Statue. She was one of four extras who posed naked, covered with white body makeup and holding a bit of strategically placed drapery.
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St. Denis’s impact on Hollywood didn’t come by way of a direct implant. Since she trained so many actresses, and was seen by such a large audience, it was more a matter of osmosis, of an influence that seeped in. She had far more respect for, empathy with, and genuine curiosity about Asian and Middle Eastern ethnic dance traditions than did Hollywood, which trafficked in stereotypes and made little distinction between Chinese, Arabic, Javanese, Spanish, or East Indian temptresses. Hollywood borrowed from St. Denis, nonetheless, merging her exotic “look” and some of her characteristic undulating movements with those of other Oriental and Arabic stock types, including Theda Bara favorites like Salome and Cleopatra.

Myrna took only about a year of classes with Miss Ruth, along with classes in Spanish dancing that Della sponsored. But Ruth St. Denis had an impact on young Myrna that went beyond their actual hours together as teacher and student. Myrna kept a scrapbook with meticulously art nouveau–style hand-decorated borders she drew and colored herself with pastel crayons. She called her scrapbook “Angels of the Dance,” and held on to it over the years, through all the changes of address. It has survived and is filled with clippings that Myrna, between the ages of fifteen and twenty, cut out of newspapers and magazines. She pasted in images of her personal angels—Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, and Theodore Kosloff, the dramatic Russian dancer who appeared in DeMille films, had a studio in Los Angeles, and had been the lover of Natacha Rambova, the dancer-designer who became Rudolph Valentino’s wife. Myrna included in her “Angels of the Dance” scrapbook a copy of a Richard Le Gallienne translation of a poem, “Omar’s Lost Love Song,” another testament to her susceptibility to the romance of the atmospheric East. But the chief angel in Myrna’s scrapbook is Ruth St. Denis herself. There are more images of and about St. Denis than of any other. Myrna gave a place of honor to a highlighted quote from Miss St. Denis that mirrored her own thoughts: “Beauty is a spiritual quality, and must prevail.”
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Ruth St. Denis’s cult of beauty, her quiet exoticism, her esteem for the crafts of set and costume design, her belief that all the arts are interrelated, and her emphasis on being both natural and restrained when performing fused with Myrna’s own impulses, which Della had helped to mold. In California, free of David’s moralizing constraints, Della was doing her best to turn Myrna into an “aesthetic” performing artist, a version of what she might have become if she’d had the chance. “If her father had lived,” Della said of Myrna, “I doubt very much if she’d have had this [performer’s] life.” Della’s goals for Myrna, in these first California years, harmonized with those Myrna developed for herself. As Ruth St. Denis, whose own mother played a key role in the dancer’s formation, once told a class filled with mostly young female dance students, “A talented girl is the result of a mother who has been repressed and into whom goes all that mother’s ambition and culture.”
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Della had started Myrna with downtown ballet classes at Madame Matilda’s École de Choréographie Classicet
[sic]
. There Myrna practiced her pliés, pirouettes, and arabesques and threw herself into the discipline of barre work. But Mme. Matilda, who had danced professionally at La Scala, took it upon herself to inform her Montana-bred pupil early on that she would never become a professional ballet dancer because she didn’t have the kind of arched feet or short toes that adapted well to work
en pointe
. Myrna may have felt momentary disappointment, but giving up ballet for modern interpretive dance came to feel exactly right.

Myrna had a definite aim and the ambition to match it. She fervently wished to become a professional interpretive dancer with a studio and her own company, just like Ruth St. Denis. When she confessed this, in her sophomore year, to the two headmistresses at Westlake School for Girls, the headmistresses chastised her, informing Myrna that for a Westlake girl, who’d been given every advantage and trained to enter Society, a future career as a dancer was unsuitable. It simply would not do. The headmistresses bought into the entrenched view that for females all professional performing was low class and morally suspect. When Myrna reported this snooty outburst to her mother, Della agreed that Myrna should leave Westlake and its finishing-school atmosphere after her sophomore year and transfer to a more sympathetic school, one that did not look down on artists. As Myrna put it, “I decided that since I already was familiar with the correct fork use, I really didn’t need the school. I wanted more from life.”
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Myrna transferred to a public school—the free tuition was another plus—near the beach, Venice Union Polytechnic High, and at once preferred it to Westlake. Venice High offered classes in sculpture with a well-known sculptor and teacher, Harry F. Winebrenner, and a chance for Myrna to study drama and elocution, as well as English, at which she excelled. She did poorly, as she always had, in math but was able to learn the role of Ophelia when she served as understudy in a school production of
Hamlet
. To help her develop and expand her performing skills, she signed up for lessons downtown in singing. Socially, she remained quite isolated from her fellow students. Since she entered Venice High School as a junior, she found herself an outsider, excluded from cliques and friendships that her classmates had already formed. Venice High, unlike Westlake, had boy students, but according to Della, “High school boys were too carefree to hold her interest. She admired men who had an aim in life. . . . Myrna has always been attracted to older men.” Myrna did nurse a secret crush on a football player and went out a few times with a neighbor, a young actor from Mississippi named Truman Van Dyke, who appeared in movie serials. Truman took her tea dancing at the Montmartre Café on Hollywood Boulevard (
BB
, 37). An older man, a photoplay title writer named Howard Buffum, corresponded with her. In a letter, he complimented her for her determination to help her mother, who was ill at the time, and referred to her relationship with Truman Van Dyke. “Your friendship with Truman I am watching,” he wrote, “hoping it will unfold beautifully.”
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It didn’t. The chaste Myrna, although she was blossoming into a beauty who would be chosen her school’s Queen of the May, was far more interested in her artistic pursuits and her few close girlfriends than in having a serious beau. Della surely helped to orchestrate this state of (no) affairs. She encouraged Myrna’s independence and nurtured her talents and friendships, so long as they posed no threat to her own supremacy or ambitions on Myrna’s behalf. She was no conventional stage mother, breathing down her daughter’s neck and arranging her calendar. Myrna, a good planner and organizer, handled her own date book, and when bookings began to arrive, she set them up herself. But Della loomed large in the background. When Myrna got an opportunity to audition or perform as a dancer, Della would accompany her at the piano. Della also played the piano for them when Myrna and her friends Lou and Betty performed together at a women’s club, and yet again when the three girls appeared as dancers on a Chautauqua program. The dancer who preceded them on the latter occasion had broken a string of beads, which then noisily rolled all over the stage. The stage crew, if there was one, failed to pick up the fallen beads before the next number ensued, to the chagrin of the three dancing girls waiting in the wings. Betty and Lou tried to persuade Myrna that they should bow out, that they would hurt their feet if they tried to dance barefooted on the hard beads, but Myrna, who had set up the booking, insisted that they must go on, bruised feet or not, “for art’s sake.” They danced, and they suffered the consequences.
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By the time Myrna approached her seventeenth birthday, Della had begun to invest her hopes in her daughter’s future earning capacity. Money from the sale of the Helena house was gone, and Della’s income as a piano teacher and sometime shopkeeper remained meager. She does not seem to have tried to become a bigger earner, perhaps believing she could not shoulder a full-time job. Her sister, Lu, couldn’t work either; she had to stay home to care for her now bedridden daughter, Laura Belle. David junior was still in grade school. Della looked to Myrna as the family’s best financial hope.

Myrna took several part-time jobs while still in high school, and she immediately turned over any money she made to her mother. She earned twenty-five dollars a month teaching a children’s dance class at the Ritter School of Expression in Culver City. During the summer she briefly replaced an acquaintance who worked as a film splicer at the David Horsley laboratories. This was her first employment in a movie-related job, but at the time movies had not yet captured her imagination. “I was a
danseuse
” (
BB
, 37).
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One job for which Myrna wasn’t paid in money, but that reaped rich benefits of another sort, was modeling for her Venice High School sculpture teacher, Harry Fielding Winebrenner. A sculptor who had studied in Rome and at the Art Institute of Chicago before becoming primarily a teacher, Mr. Winebrenner was creating an allegorical group sculpture for the school’s grounds, a “Fountain of Education” to be placed before the outdoor pool. Winebrenner looked for students to serve as live models for his three abstractions, selecting a football player to embody the Physical, a pretty girl who got good grades to personify the Mental, and Myrna Williams to stand for the dominant spiritual figure, Inspiration, “a prismatic refraction of intelligent understanding, beauty and grace.” In the completed sculpture Myrna’s slender, loosely draped figure stands highest, with face uplifted and one arm extended in front of her, the other reaching behind, a vision of purity, grace, youthful vigor, and aspiration that caught a reporter’s attention. “Southland Produces Venus,” ran the headline for an article about the group sculpture in the
Los Angeles Times
. The other two models were ignored.
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Because of the sculpture, Myrna Williams’s name appeared in the newspapers for the first time, and it would appear again, along with a photograph of Myrna’s portion of the statue, a year later when the sculpture of her was separated from the other two figures and transported aboard a battleship, the
Nevada
, for a Memorial Day pageant (directed by Thomas Ince) at Venice Beach. Two other battleships, it was announced, would fire salvos, seven airplanes would strew flowers in tribute to the war dead, and a wreath from President Harding would be dropped into the sea. A
Los Angeles Times
news story promised that “Miss Myrna Williams, a Venice high school girl who posed for the statue, will take part in the ceremonies aboard ship.” For many years the figure of Myrna presided over Venice High from its pedestal near the flagpole in front of the main building. Constructed in cement, it was vulnerable to weather and repeated vandalism and was removed in 2002. An alumni-led fund-raising campaign made it possible to duplicate the original and this time cast it in bronze. The new statue was unveiled at a ceremony in front of the high school in April 2010.
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