Hollywood Madonna (16 page)

Once the adoption was no longer an issue, all the scenario needed was a bluebird ending, with Loretta acquiring a husband and Judy a father. Even if a knowledgeable writer decided to weave the details of the adoption into a real screenplay, no studio would have green lighted it. In Hollywood, it would have been a
film à clef;
to women, it would have been another example of the circuitous route one of their sex was forced to take because of an irresponsible male; to the critics, it would have just been implausible. Some might even have quoted the final line of Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler:
“People don’t do things like that.” Little did they know. In a sense there was no need to film “My Mortal Sin.” It had already been done live and on location.

Loretta was never a good judge of men. In 1938, she had another short-lived romance, this time with Wall Street broker and playboy William P. Buckner, Jr., who was six years her senior—for Loretta, something of a record. He too failed to be her cleft in the rock of the world. Buckner’s gimmick was Philippine railway bonds that would guarantee a 20 percent profit on $2 million. The investors he envisioned were not members of his own circle, many of whom were familiar with his scams and steered clear of him. Rather, the target was movie stars, obscenely wealthy with money to invest in any enterprise that promised a healthy yield. Whether he included Loretta in his pool of suckers is unclear. He preferred to negotiate with male actors (e.g., Ronald Colman, Herbert Marshall, Frank Morgan, Bing Crosby) through intermediaries, such as
a retired British army officer, J. Stuart Hyde, and a former Wall Street acquaintance, C. Westley Turner.

Buckner may have fancied himself in love with Loretta or thought of her as a way of acquiring credibility in Hollywood. Even at twenty-five, Loretta was an amateur in the game of love. Buckner had charm; he was a well-traveled bon vivant who knew how to woo the impressionable Loretta. She must have been surprised when, on 1 December 1938, he returned from England on the Queen Mary and was promptly arrested for mail fraud.
Buckner claimed he was innocent
and was en route to Los Angeles to marry Loretta! But the next day, Buckner told a different story: “
It would be nice
to be able to say that I am engaged to Loretta Young … but it is not so.” Still, Buckner protested his innocence: “
I have the fullest expectation
of being able to show that I am wholly innocent of the charges.” On 12 January 1939, Loretta told federal agents that she never invested with Bruckner, but she evaded their question about a possible marriage: “
Am I going to marry
him? I don’t care to make any statement.” She was now an expert at dealing with the press. On 5 July 1939, Buckner was fined $2500 and sentenced to two years in prison.

On 31 July 1940, Loretta became a bride. This time, there was a church wedding. Naturally, the groom was an older man—eleven years older, to be exact. And he was from advertising, not from the movies, like Grant Withers. Even more important, Tom Lewis was a Catholic, who took a more rational approach to his faith than Loretta, whose Catholicism was rooted in convent school notions of sin and guilt, tinged with emotion but not always buttressed by reason. She often behaved irrationally, particularly in her determination never to miss Sunday mass for fear of committing a mortal sin.

Lewis met Loretta in January 1939 when Young and Rubicam sent him to the West Coast to handle programming for
Screen Guild Theatre
, which debuted on CBS radio in 1938 and, like
Lux Radio Theatre
, featured stars in adaptations of films, sometimes re-creating their screen roles. Lewis wanted Loretta for his first show, and she agreed. Unmarried, Lewis, the quintessential Catholic layperson, was immediately attracted to her. When Lewis scheduled a Sunday 9:00 a.m. rehearsal, Loretta’s agent at William Morris called him, explaining that his client would be at a party the night before and would be attending 11:00 a.m. mass. Lewis countered that he, too, would be at a party and planned to attend the 8:00 a.m. service. There was no compromise: Lewis accompanied Loretta to the 11:00 a.m. mass at Blessed Sacrament, a Jesuit parish on Sunset Boulevard. There, they encountered Loretta’s first grade teacher,
Sister Marina, who instinctively knew the couple was destined to be together and promised to make a novena for them. Loretta, who had gone through the “right man” phase before, grew apprehensive, wondering if the nun’s premature optimism could land the two of them “
in a spot
.” Did Loretta imagine another romance headed toward marriage, only to be derailed by scandal? Or did she think that the nun’s prediction was a jinx?

This time, everything worked out—at least it did so for almost two decades. On Wednesday, 31 July 1940, the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Loretta and Lewis were married at the Church of St. Paul in Westwood. The service had been scheduled for noon, but crowds started gathering much earlier, and by the time the bride and groom arrived, 2,000 spectators had assembled. Loretta looked ravishing in an “
iridescent water-lily blue tulle dress
.” Loretta insisted on a simple ceremony. Accordingly, there were no bridesmaids, only a maid of honor, her half sister Georgiana, and a best man, Lewis’s brother Charles. Since Loretta’s father had disappeared twenty years earlier, her brother John gave her away. The ceremony was restricted to family and friends, much to the disappointment of the fans. But at least they saw Loretta step into a limo amid a shower of rice, through a path that had been cleared by five police officers.

Judy now had a stepfather. Henceforth, she would be Judy Lewis. By 1945, she had two half brothers: Peter Charles, born in 1944, and Christopher Paul, born in 1945. It seemed a perfect ending to a scenario that shifted back and forth between hope and disillusionment. For Judy, it was also a happy ending—but not for very long.

CHAPTER 11
Return from the Ashes

By January 1936, it was time for Loretta to go back to work. Like the phoenix, she had risen from the ashes of unwed motherhood—the stigma expunged, the evidence temporarily concealed, and the future brighter than it had been the previous fall. Although Loretta had convinced herself that she had committed a mortal sin, she at least had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not as serious as abortion.

Loretta might have enjoyed some peace of mind if she sought out a liberal priest, accustomed to hearing actors’ confessions, who would have given her a penance of five Hail Marys and told her to get on with her life. Loretta did, in her own way. She returned to her Bel-Air home with Gladys, while a trustworthy nurse remained in Venice to take care of Judy, whom Loretta visited periodically. But the subterfuge could not continue indefinitely. Loretta and Dr. Holleran were fleshing out the plot points in the adoption scenario, which would be finished in six months, with Judy being placed at St. Elizabeth’s. Loretta was still a working actress, slated for four films in 1936, and four more in 1937. Professional obligations had to take precedence over the joys of motherhood.

The orphan adoption scenario was worthy of Dickens, who used a similar one in
Bleak House
, in which Lady Dedlock’s affair with an army captain involved a more elaborate subterfuge, as one would expect in an eight-hundred-page novel that allows for considerably more subplots than a ninety-minute film. Since the reconciliation between Loretta and her daughter had not yet occurred when
Uncommon Knowledge
was published, but instead happened a short time before Loretta’s death, only Judy Lewis can reconstruct that moment of truth. It was probably never as theatrical as Lady Dedlock’s disclosure to her daughter, Esther, when, dropping to her knees, Lady Dedlock implores, “
Oh, my child
, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! Oh, try to forgive me.” That
would have been a great scene for any actress—including Loretta, if Hollywood had decided to film the novel. But Zanuck had other plans for his star.

When Loretta checked in at Fox that January, she discovered that Zanuck had loaned her out to MGM again. Because
Midnight Mary
proved so successful, MGM wanted to reunite Loretta and Franchot Tone in
The Unguarded Hour
(1936), an adaptation of a British melodrama with Tone as Lord Dearden, a leading barrister, and Loretta as his wife. Loretta’s voice was now sufficiently cultivated that she did not have to affect a British accent, as she was forced to do in
The Devil to Pay
. Instead, she injected a melodic lilt into her speech, as if she were playing drawing room comedy, which was enough to suggest the character belonged to a world of peerage. Tone’s, on the other hand, was faux British but adequate for a film where intricacy of plot was more important than authenticity of accent.

There is always a villain in melodrama, and in
The Unguarded Hour
it is Hugh Lewis (the lethally suave Henry Daniell, London-born and sounding it). Lewis informs Lady Dearden that his wife has incriminating letters from her husband, dating back to the time when they were lovers, which, if published, will derail Dearden’s political career. Rather than jeopardize her husband’s future, Lady Dearden offers to buy them, unaware of the consequences, which include a fall from a Dover cliff, a murder, a false confession from Lord Dearden, and his unmasking of the real killer, who, of course, is Lewis. Like
Dial M for Murder
,
Sleuth
, and
Deathtrap
,
The Unguarded Hour
is the kind of film with enough plot twists to hold the viewer’s attention until the narrative cord can bear no further knotting and slackens, buoyed up one last time for an unexpected but not implausible denouement.

The Unguarded Hour’
s significance lies in its director, the estimable Sam Wood, who preferred directing films based on novels (e.g.,
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
,
Kitty Foyle
,
Kings Row
, and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
) to those based on plays. Yet he did well with stage adaptations, which require careful pacing to hide their theatrical origins. Wood learned the importance of pacing and rhythm in the silent era; he had directed thirty-two silents before he made his first talkie,
So This Is College
(1929), with two actors from Broadway, Elliot Nugent and Robert Montgomery. By 1935, he displayed his ability to hold a fractious narrative together in the Marx Brothers classic
A Night at the Opera
, a magnificent example of controlled anarchy. By 1936, a creaky melodrama like
The Unguarded Hour
posed no problem; he knew how to keep the film from splitting into narrative
fragments, preserving its theatricality by using a fade out to mark the end of a scene, like the lowering of a curtain. Wood’s best stage adaptations are
Our Town
(1940) and
Command Decision
(1949)
.
Despite Wood’s sensitive direction and Aaron Copland’s evocative score,
Our Town
lacked the original’s uncompromisingly bleak ending. In the film, Emily’s death in childbirth and her return to earth to relive one day, moving among the living who cannot see her, turns out to be a dream—except to those who knew Thornton Wilder’s play.

Janet Gaynor headed the cast of Loretta’s next film,
Ladies in Love
(1936), but was not the star. No one was; it was not a question of stardom, but of empathy. Although the leading roles are evenly distributed, the script was structured in such a way that audiences could root for their favorite lady. But if their sympathies lay anywhere, it was with Loretta. Gaynor was costarred with Loretta and Constance Bennett, as three young women from the provinces who set out for Budapest in search of wealthy husbands—only to discover that a Cinderella can meet her Prince Charming, have a fling with him, and then stand by while he marries someone from his own class. Since Gaynor was an Oscar winner (few could forget her performance in
Seventh Heaven
[1929]), and highly respected by the industry and the public, she received top billing, followed by Loretta and Constance Bennett. When Tyrone Power (then Tyrone Power Jr.), looking preternaturally beautiful as a Hungarian count, spots Loretta working as a chorine in a nightclub, their interlocked gaze, etherealized by front lighting, suggests that the lady of the chorus has met her royal deliverer, and that a fairytale ending is in the offing. But it was not to be; theirs was the only kind of dalliance that royalty have with commoners. As a result,
Ladies in
Love became a sobering study in the disappointments of working class women who set their sights on upper class men.

Some moviegoers might have sensed a similarity between
Ladies in Love
and
The Greeks Had a Word for Them
(1932), a Samuel Goldwyn production. And theatergoers would have known that Goldwyn’s film was based on a play by Zoë Akins (at the time America’s leading female dramatist) called
The Greeks Had a Word for It
, which opened on Broadway in September 1930 and enjoyed a run of 253 performances. Goldwyn, an avid follower of the New York theatre scene, bought the rights,
expecting little, if any, opposition
from the Hays office. Will Hays, Warren Harding’s postmaster general, had been relatively tolerant about film content during the early years of the sound era, but in this case he did not object
to the subject matter (husband hunters) so much as to the title, which he suspected the self-righteous would consider prurient. “It” could be interpreted as a euphemism for what Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s
Annie Get Your Gun
calls “doin’ what comes naturally.” And so,
The Greeks Had Word for It
became
The Greeks Had a Word for Them
, as if “them” was less suggestive than “it.” Regardless, the film was not one of 1932’s major attractions. It might even have been a noble failure if Sidney Howard (a fine playwright, toiling in Hollywood) had retained Akins’s denouement, in which the trio continued to ply their trade. Instead, Howard has one of them succeed in finding a husband.