Hollywood Madonna (20 page)

The last of Loretta’s 1938 films was
Kentucky
; released just before the end of the year to qualify for the Oscars. It was nominated in one category: Best Supporting Actor. The winner was Walter Brennan as a Yankee-hating son of the Confederacy, whose bias is explained in the 1861 prologue, when his character, Peter Goodwin, appears as a boy. Although Kentucky remained in the Union during the war, there were families, like the slave-holding Goodwins, that sympathized with the Confederate cause. To the Unionists, such families were rebels. When a Union official, John Dillon, arrives at the Goodwin plantation with an order to confiscate the livestock, Peter’s father, Thad Goodwin, becomes so enraged that he draws his pistol, but he is shot before he can fire. Peter witnesses the killing; unable to avenge his father’s death, he harbors a deep hatred for Dillon’s descendants.

The prologue had more potential for drama than the film proper, which cannot make up its mind if it is a domestic tragedy, a romantic melodrama, or a horse-as-hero movie on the order of Capra’s
Broadway Bill
(1933). Seventy-five years go by, and the main action takes place in 1938. Thad Goodwin Jr. has a daughter, Sally (Loretta), who is also Peter’s niece, and John Dillon Jr. has a son, also named John (Richard Greene). Even though Sally is a Goodwin, and John a Dillon, we are only in feuding family, not Montague-Capulet, country—which does not mean that the course of true love will run smoothly. Sally eventually gets John Dillon III, even though the audience is denied the usual kissing couple fadeout—perhaps because the romantic subplot is secondary to what is implied by the title. No matter how the credits read, the star is Kentucky, the costar is Walter Brennan, and the supporting cast is headed by a horse, followed by Loretta and Greene.

Any movie entitled
Kentucky
would have to highlight the Derby, which is cleverly worked into the plot so that the climax can take place at Churchill Downs. A horse joins the cast: Bluegrass, the proverbial dark horse that everyone hopes will come in first. And if Bluegrass does, will he suffer the same fate as Broadway Bill, the horse that gallops triumphantly through the finish line and then collapses in death? Bluegrass is a bona fide character; he may be a horse, but he stands in for anyone who has been pegged a loser and confounds the skeptics by doing a star turn. We know Loretta and Greene will resolve their problems and go
into a clinch, on or off the screen. It will be much easier with the death of Peter, who is adamantly opposed to his niece’s involvement with a Dillon. Once Bluegrass wins the cup, it is Peter whose heart gives out from excitement, and it is Peter who posthumously gets the last scene when John Dillon Jr. delivers the eulogy at his funeral, reminding the mourners that, with Peter’s demise, “We are burying a way of life. “

Some moviegoers might have felt that Peter’s was a way of life that should be buried, based, as it was, on false ideals and festering hatred—not to mention racism, which is also reflected in the film’s portrayal of the Southern black as illiterate darkie, a stereotype that Hollywood perpetuated over the years and that many whites accepted as fact. Although the Goodwins treated their slaves and later their servants humanely, they did so condescendingly, as if, as Christians, they were expected to be tolerant of inferiors. And for all the accolades heaped on Walter Brennan for his portrayal of Peter, he gave a performance in one key, in a voice so petulant that he would have been a prime candidate for anger management classes if they had existed in 1938.

This was Loretta’s second color feature. She was given a wardrobe with soft colors: white, yellow, pink, and pale blue. Although an equestrian like Sally Goodwin would have been comfortable in jodhpurs, they did little for Loretta except call attention to her backside. Her makeup was also a problem. Her face lacked its usual translucence and delicately sculpted cheekbones. Instead, it looked like an alabaster mask with rouge-tinged cheeks that seemed stained. Neither her makeup nor Greene’s was consistent. At times, Greene looked as if he were not so much made up as painted. When Loretta’s makeup was applied less extravagantly, the old aura returned. But black-and-white truly did her justice, and it was not until 1949, when she was thirty-six, that she appeared in another color film. Zanuck was pleased with the final script, requesting only minor changes. But the film did nothing for Loretta, who was eclipsed by a state, a horse, a race, and Walter Brennan, who for some reason endeared himself to the public.

The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
(1939), Loretta’s last film at Fox, was not hers; both the title and the credits confirmed as much. Don Ameche in the title role headed the cast, followed by Loretta and Henry Fonda as Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, the recipient of the world’s first phone call: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Bell was Ameche’s most memorable role, which he played with an ardor that reduced everyone else to supporting cast status, despite their billing. Like Loretta, Fonda learned that at Fox, contract players were the equivalent of repertory
actors: a lead today and a supporting role tomorrow. The year that
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
was released also saw the release of one of Fonda’s best-remembered films, John Ford’s
Young Mr. Lincoln
, in which Fonda played the title role. Only a movie buff would associate Fonda with
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
, which was Ameche’s film, and his alone. Everyone else was relegated to the wings until needed on stage.

Loretta was not needed that often. When she was, she looked ravishing—particularly when Bell proposes marriage on the staircase, both of them using an encoded language that might seem too decorous for ordinary mortals, but not for the angelic Loretta or her character, Myrtle Hubbard, who is propriety incarnate. Myrtle is also deaf; it is Bell’s reputation as a teacher of the hearing-impaired (who performs scientific experiments in his spare time) that results in his meeting Myrtle, who has mastered the art of lip reading. Since the historical Myrtle Hubbard was deaf, the screenwriter, the invaluable Lamar Trotti, acknowledged her condition and then consigned it to plot point limbo, the repository of once used and then discarded information, so Loretta would not be burdened with the dual task of looking beautiful and reading lips. Once the film takes a romantic turn, Myrtle’s deafness becomes irrelevant; Loretta plays her scenes with Ameche as she would with any leading man with whom she is supposed to fall in love.

The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
is one of Fox’s more accurate biopics; certainly there is less embroidering of the facts than there was in
Suez
, even though the latter is cinematically more impressive with its disaster scenes and special effects. But there is some massaging of facts. The historical Myrtle was not enthusiastic about her husband’s experiments with the telephone; her father, one of Bell’s chief financial backers, preferred that he concentrate on the telegraph. Trotti’s Myrtle, in contrast, is the perfect inventor’s wife: She simply tells her husband to continue with the telegraph, while he secretly works on the telephone.

The film was handsomely mounted and well acted, but with little sense of urgency or drama. Essentially, it was an information retrieval movie. Since everyone knows the outcome, there is no suspense. Trotti realized he could not make the world’s first phone call the climax. For those who did not know that Bell might have become a historical footnote, and that the invention of the telephone could have been attributed to Western Union, Trotti devised as dramatic a conclusion as the facts would allow. Bell initiates a law suit that generates little heat. Myrtle, now pregnant, is in the courtroom; she is also in possession of a letter proving that Bell succeeded in transmitting sound through a wire. When she goes into
labor, Bell uses his invention to contact the hospital. Bell wins his suit, and the film ends as he describes his dream of air transportation.

For Loretta,
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
had a personal significance. It was the only time she and her three sisters appeared in the same film. The three played Myrtle’s sisters: Gertrude (Sally Blane), Grace (Polly Ann Young), and Berta (Georgiana Belzer). Sally’s resemblance to Loretta is so striking that seeing them together is like the charm of recognition that comes from leafing through the family album on a rainy afternoon. Perhaps in any year other than 1939 Ameche might at least have garnered an Oscar nomination. But 1939 was the year of
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
,
The Wizard of Oz
,
Stagecoach
,
Destry Rides Again, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory
,
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Women
, and the one and only
Gone with the Wind
. Who cared about an invention that in 1939 was taken for granted?

Loretta had mustered enough courage to say her own farewell to Zanuck, not knowing that she would be back for three more films. In 1939, she felt that the cord had been severed. At a meeting with Zanuck and Joseph Schenck, then president, she voiced her disillusionment: “
Darryl, I won’t
work with you …. In all the years I’ve been here, you never once sent me flowers or given me a bonus or even a raise …. I went back for ‘Mother Was (sic) a Freshman’ and ‘Come to the Stable’ And boy, Fox paid!” Zanuck felt the same about Loretta, going to whatever lengths he could to see that she paid for her ingratitude. Hollywood buzzed with “Loretta will never eat lunch in this town again” rumors. But Loretta was always able to find a protector, at least temporarily. And she found champions now in Walter Wanger and Harry Cohn.

CHAPTER 13
The Price of Freedom

Loretta could have continued indefinitely at Fox, but if she stayed beyond 1939, there would have been nothing for her except more of the same. She must have known that Zanuck had his favorites: the more bankable talent, the bigger box office draws such as Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Maureen O’Hara, and Loretta’s replacement, the sylphlike Gene Tierney, the perfect mirror image for Tyrone Power, who still had his looks, but without the androgynous glow. Loretta was no longer one of the inner circle.

While Loretta was shimmery and angelic, a beam from the moon’s bright side, the exotic Tierney seemed to emanate from both the light and the dark. She could play the daughter of Hecate or Diana. Put Tierney in a rowboat, with sunglasses shielding her eyes from the sight of her drowning disabled nephew (a fate that she diabolically engineered in
Leave Her to Heaven
[1945]), and she is even deadlier than Regina in
The Little Foxes
(1941), who makes no effort to retrieve her husband’s medicine when he is having a heart attack. Loretta could never have played Ellen in
Leave Her to Heaven
. Nor was there any likelihood that, when Zanuck decided to remake
Love Is News
as
That Wonderful Urge
(1948), he would have had Loretta reprise the role she had originated. Once Zanuck saw Tierney on the stage in
The Male
Animal (1940), he knew he had found Loretta’s successor. Tierney was not long for Broadway; she was off to Hollywood that same year, making her movie debut in Fox’s
The Return of Frank James
(1940). Zanuck had no problem with Power—ten years older and now merely handsome rather than beautiful—re-creating his role in the
Love Is News
remake. But Power needed a younger and fresher talent, and Tierney could easily step into Loretta’s shoes. Like Loretta, Tierney could also play Asians (
China Girl)
. She was
the new Loretta, even as Jeanne Crain was the ingénue and budding dramatic actress that Loretta once was.

Zanuck was also going through his blonde period. At first he touted Alice Faye, holding Betty Grable in reserve. But Grable gradually came into her own, supplanting Faye as Fox’s musical queen. Longevity was a major concern of Zanuck’s. As Grable was nearing thirty, he began grooming the younger June Haver, a superb dancer but no match for the World War II pinup in a white bathing suit. Haver was “the girl next door,” not the kind that GIs taped inside their locker doors. Perhaps out of gratitude, Zanuck threw Grable a few crumbs, even costarring her with her successor, Marilyn Monroe, in
How to Marry a Millionaire
(1953). Since Monroe was only a passable dancer, he tapped Sheree North, whose dancing was the highlight of the Broadway musical
Hazel Flagg.
But the Fox musical had seen better days, and Marilyn was too bedeviled by the demons of insecurity to be reliable. Still obsessed with blondes, he found a Marilyn clone in Jayne Mansfield, a comically gifted actress with a sense of self-parody she revealed in the Broadway play
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Mansfield re-created her role in the 1957 movie version that bore the same title but little resemblance to the original, a mordantly clever Faustian take on the extent to which some will go to achieve fame in a medium where “integrity” is not in anyone’s lexicon. Mansfield’s tenure at Fox was brief, as was her career, which ended with a fatal car crash in 1967.

Fox in the 1940s and 1950s was no place for Loretta Young.
Loretta insisted
on claiming that Zanuck had her “blacklisted” for walking out on him. She did not know what it was like to be blacklisted. The writers and actors who were persecuted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the late 1940s and 1950s for their politics knew. Loretta was a blacklistee who continued to work. Zanuck had no choice but to express outrage at Loretta’s decision, although whether or not he felt it was another matter. It was a variation on the “Nobody leaves a star” syndrome: Nobody leaves Zanuck until he decides it’s time.

Zanuck probably was relieved. He had essentially written Loretta off. Her expectations did not coincide with his perception of her as a competent but essentially decorative performer, whose idea of passionate love was convent school foreplay. Loretta could never be a femme fatale like Linda Darnell, or a mysterious beauty like Gene Tierney, who seemed too well bred for passion, but whose veiled look could make a viewer curious about the difference between Tierney veiled and unveiled. Loretta
was already a star. Now she could fend for herself, while Zanuck added newer celestial bodies to the Fox firmament.