Hollywood Madonna (19 page)

There was no “working actress” job description during the studio years. If one had existed, it would state that a working actress is one who works, despite the quality of the material handed to her. And if she balks at the assignment, she goes on suspension, switches studios, or freelances, as Loretta began doing when she left Fox in 1939. She must have sensed that in the coming decade the roles would be fewer or not worth accepting, unless money or ego were the sole considerations.

At the end of 1937, Loretta knew it was only a matter of time before her days at Fox were over. The previous year, she refused to do
Lloyds of London
(1936), claiming that the role she was offered, which went to Madeleine Carroll, was too small. “Loretta Young Walks Out In Huff Over
Film Role,” a
Los Angeles Times
headline (6 September 1936) announced. It was true: Loretta flew to San Francisco and took a boat to Honolulu. She was developing a reputation for being difficult. Zanuck did not know how difficult she could be. Loretta had not yet begun to fight.

CHAPTER 12
Addio, Darryl

Zanuck was so pleased with the box office receipts for
Wife, Doctor and Nurse
that Loretta and Warner Baxter were teamed again in
Wife, Husband and Friend
,
adapted from James M. Cain’s
novella,
Career in C Major
(1936). By 1936, Cain’s bestseller,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1934), had already established him as a novelist who transcended the gaudy prose of the pulps. By the time
Wife, Husband and Friend
was released, he had published another novel, the controversial
Serenade
, fraught with racial stereotyping and homophobia, none of which appeared in the 1956 movie version with Mario Lanza as an operatic tenor caught between two women. Opera was not alien to Cain. Although he was an acknowledged master of hardboiled fiction, he aspired to be an opera singer but soon discovered that his forte was language; however, he never lost his love of opera, which resonates throughout
Career in C Major
, in which a contractor discovers he is a natural baritone, as opposed to his un-talented wife, who aspires to be a concert artist.
Career
is a first-person narrative, told almost exclusively from the point of view of the contractor, Leonard Boland, in a style hardly befitting an opera singer. It mixes streetwise vernacular, tangy and colorful, with the kind of metaphors (a conductor’s demeanor is “as cheerful as cold gravy with grease caked on the egg”) that became the hallmark of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Ellroy.

The specter of the Great Depression broods over Cain’s novella. Leonard’s business is suffering, although his socialite wife, Doris, is oblivious to the country’s economic woes and focuses solely on her concert debut, which proves a disaster. When Cecil Carver, a concert and opera star, accidentally hears Leonard sing, she experiences the “star is born” syndrome and immediately grooms him for a singing career, introducing him to the rituals of the concert and operatic stage. Leonard is an
overnight sensation, and Cain allows his narrator to describe his initiation into an alien world as he dissects the plots of
La Bohème
and
Rigoletto
in a refreshingly muscular style, lacking in highbrow pretentiousness. But Cain knows enough not to have Leonard triumph at his wife’s expense. After a catastrophic
Rigoletto
, Leonard realizes he is out of his element. Then, in an eleventh-hour reprieve, an offer comes through to build a bridge in Alabama. And
Career
ends with the Bolands en route to the Deep South as they sing, off key, the duet, “Là ci darem la mano “ from
Don Giovanni
.

Wife, Husband and Friend
follows the broad outlines of the novella, with Loretta and Baxter as the Bolands, and Binnie Barnes as Cecil Carver. In the film, Leonard’s operatic debut is a singer’s nightmare. A grotesque costume that looks like a fat suit, a stringy beard, and a floppy hairpiece all conspire against him. Leonard storms off stage, now able to understand how Doris felt when she read her hostile notices. Nunnally Johnson wrote an engaging script, which Gregory Ratoff directed capably, but without much flair. Still, the film featured a number of good performances, particularly from Loretta and Barnes, who played Cecil as if she were as serious about making Leonard into an artist as she was about netting him for herself—thus adding another dimension to the “other woman” type. The character actors did their usual scene stealing: the blustery, gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette as the owner of the construction company, and the imperious Helen Westley as Doris’s mother.

Ten years later, Fox remade
Wife, Husband and Friend
as
Everybody Does It
(1949), and in this case the remake was superior to the original. But it used the same basic plot, with Cecil (Linda Darnell) becoming Leonard’s (Paul Douglas) muse, determined to launch his career and steal him from his wife (Celeste Holm). The production values were much higher in the remake, and Douglas, looking burlier and more befuddled than Baxter, was a more suitable quarry for the predatory Darnell.
To coincide with the remake
, New American Library published a Signet paperback with the same title,
Everybody Does It
, noting that the novella was originally published as
Career in C Major
.

There was a powerfully acted scene in the original that did not appear in the remake, perhaps because either the writer (Johnson again) or director (Edmund Goulding) thought it would not work with Holm and Douglas as the Bolands. In
Wife, Husband and Friend
, when Doris discovers the truth about Leonard’s supposed business trips, she lashes out at him, pelting him with blows and landing both of them on the floor. Loretta played the scene so realistically that her slim, 105-pound body must
have sustained more than a few bruises. The sight of Douglas—looking like a construction worker getting pummeled by the petite Holm—would have produced guffaws. In the original, Loretta acted the scene so convincingly that it can still make one feel uncomfortable.

Four Men and a Prayer
(1938) was Loretta’s first and only experience working with John Ford. Despite the title, Loretta’s character—a globetrotting socialite who, in a different film, would have been a screwball heroine—is the movie’s catalyst; without her, the plot could not have been resolved. Although Ford dismissed the film (“
I just didn’t like
the story, or anything else about it, so it was a job of work”), a few scenes bear his signature. One such scene is a barroom brawl set to an Irish jig coming from a player piano and Barry Fitzgerald feinting like a boxer without any opponents. Ford’s fondness for Irish shtick could derail a film, as it almost did in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(1949), where Victor McLaglen’s high jinx left a smudge on one Ford’s most poetic works.

There was no poetry in
Four Men and a Prayer
, in which the four sons of a disgraced colonel (C. Aubrey Smith) vow to restore the reputation of their father, who was murdered before he could prove his innocence. For lack of evidence, his death is classified as a suicide. The sons know otherwise and set out for India and South America, where they discover that their father was a victim of an arms cartel that had no qualms about selling weapons to both insurgents and their oppressors. The film includes an uncommonly violent scene, in which Loretta watches in horror as soldiers gun down the rebels, leaving the steps on which they have assembled strewn with bodies. One cannot help but think of the massacre on the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s
Potemkin.
The romantic idyll that the socialite envisioned has brought her into the midst of a struggle for self-determination, where men and women are willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause. Once Loretta learns that her father is the president of the cartel, she confronts him, not acting as if she were morally superior, but simply wanting to right a wrong—particularly after having fallen in love with one of the sons (Richard Greene). The father explains that artillery is not the company’s sole export and henceforth will cease weapons production. Developing a conscience or activating one that has been dormant is not usually that sudden, but the film had to come in under ninety minutes (it ran eighty-five), so the conversion process was reduced to an epiphany. The colonel’s killer is unmasked, the sons see their father honored posthumously, and Loretta becomes part of the family.

Loretta’s character is integral to the plot. The socialite moves in international circles, attracting the attention of shady characters like war
profiteers and making it possible for the brothers to learn their identity. Although Ford expressed disinterest in the script, Loretta—her stylish wardrobe not withstanding—gave the film whatever degree of credibility it had. The brothers’ two-continent manhunt is the stuff of espionage and detective fiction, and their way of piecing information together is a variation on connecting the dots, with Loretta doing some of the connecting. Loretta’s character is achingly real. A child of privilege, indulged by a multimillionaire father, she witnesses the dark side of colonialism. She may have grown up hearing the familiar jungle movie line, “The natives are restless,” but she never saw the extent of that restlessness until she was caught in the crossfire of a rebellion. Her revulsion at the sight of innocent men, women, and children gunned down in cold blood may have been required by the script, but her face, drained of its beauty by shock and anguish, suggests that she was reacting to the scene on a more personal level. Loretta had never before been in a film in which violence erupted with such frightening immediacy that horror was the only possible reaction. Politically,
Four Men and a Prayer
was liberal and mildly anti-capitalist—except when politics took a back seat to high adventure, with the action shifting from India to England, then back to India and Argentina, and finally to England. Moviegoers who sensed that the film was ambivalent about imperialism were in the minority. This was 1938, when honor, reputation, and romance were more important than self-determination. For the prescient few,
Four Men and a Prayer
offered a glimpse into the future, when liberation movements became more widespread after the European superpowers divested themselves of their colonies.

Suez
(1938) was Loretta’s last film with Power, who received first billing—as one would expect in a biopic about Ferdinand de Lesseps (Power) and his dream of building the Suez Canal. Philip Dunne and his collaborator, Julien Josephson, devised a script involving an ill-starred romance between de Lesseps and the Countess Eugenie de Montijo (Loretta), who must choose between Louis Napoleon (Leon Ames), later known as Napoleon III, and de Lesseps. She is not influenced by Louis’s looks. Ames was a fine actor, but no match for Power’s dark beauty. Power and Loretta had already become such a romantic team that audiences expected a combination of love story and spectacle. But history, when passed through the Hollywood prism, separates into a spectrum of fact and fancy. True, there was a Ferdinand de Lesseps who, physically, would never have been mistaken for Tyrone Power; however, Napoleon III was every bit as dictatorial as he is portrayed in the film, dissolving
the legislative assembly and imprisoning dissidents. Since the historical Eugenie was reputedly a beauty, who else but Loretta could play her? Loretta could turn costumes into period attire and wigs into authentic coiffure. You could almost hear the rustle of silk when she walked—or rather glided—across a room. But Eugenie, unlike de Lesseps, is royalty, and in mid-nineteenth century Europe, a countess does not marry a diplomat obsessed with creating a waterway connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The film’s omission that Eugenie’s mother was the niece of de Lesseps’s mother, making Eugenie and de Lesseps cousins, is more significant. The historical de Lesseps married his first wife in 1837, thirteen years before the time of the main action. No matter; unrequited love plays better than domestic drama.

Although
Suez
was directed by the venerable Allan Dwan, it owes much to the second unit director, Otto Brower, who knew how to stage action in the desert, as he proved in
Under Two Flags
. A landslide that dislodges a mass of rock and earth was the work of Brower and the great special effects artist, Fred Sersen; so was the cyclone that sucks Toni (Annabella), the army brat who worships deLesseps, into it and disgorges her body on the sand. These are the scenes that linger in the memory.

Annabella, who received better notices than Power or Loretta, became the first of Power’s three wives a year after the film’s release. The marriage was short-lived, ending in divorce seven years later. Power’s second marriage, to Linda Christian, also lasted for seven years. His third marriage, to Debbie Ann Minardos, was tragically brief; six months after they were wed, Power suffered a heart attack and died on 15 November 1958 at the age of forty-four. His son was born two months later.

Loretta might well have been Power’s first wife.
Once she learned
that Power was Catholic (probably one in need of a refresher course), he was no longer an adolescent crush, but a desirable costar and potential mate. Whether Power felt similarly about Loretta is a matter of conjecture. The press felt they were made for each other, and the public did, too—but not Zanuck. To him, they were good copy—fan food, like hors d’oeuvres, not the main course. If they married, Zanuck feared he would lose his investment, and he had no intention of taking such a loss. It would be better if Power were seen with someone much plainer, another Fox contract player without a definable persona or the promise of a major career.
In other words
, Sonja Henie. Loretta continued to harbor some affection for Power, even though she was demoralized, as she later told Zanuck, when she learned that after Power’s first year at Fox,
his salary was raised
twice, and hers was not.
At Power’s funeral
, she arrived in costume after
filming an episode for her television show, in which she played an Asian. Loretta claimed she had no time to change, but flashbulbs popped, and her appearance was the highlight of the occasion. Photo op or farewell? Probably both.