Hollywood Madonna (34 page)

Two of the roles, both Bette Davis vehicles, must have struck a responsive chord in Loretta:
The Old Maid
(30 October 1939) and
The Great Lie
(2 March 1942). In the former, Loretta was Charlotte, who bears a child out of wedlock and is forced to live in her sister Delia’s home, where her daughter grows up calling Delia “mother” and referring to Charlotte as her maiden aunt.
The Great Lie
was another woman’s film, with its share of complications. Maggie (Loretta) raises her friend Sandra’s child as if it were hers and her husband’s. If Sandra’s maternal instincts resurface, will she demand the child back? Yes. Good complication. Does Sandra succeed or does she perform a magnanimous gesture?
The Great Lie
was a two-, not a three-hankie movie.

Katharine Hepburn will always be the definitive Tracy Lord in Philip Barry’s
The Philadelphia Story
(1940), a role that she created on the stage and repeated on the screen. Loretta offered a fresh take on Tracy in the
Lux
version (14 June 1943), making no attempt to duplicate Hepburn’s mandarin line readings, but delivering the dialogue as if she were in a romantic comedy like
Love is News
or
Eternally Yours.
When she tells Mike Connor (Robert Young in the James Stewart role) that she has fallen in love with his short stories, she sounds as if she were having one of her romantic fantasies; her voice has a dreamy quality, as opposed to the yearning that Hepburn was so adept at expressing. There is an inside joke in the broadcast that was also in the film. When Tracy and Connor become slightly tipsy, they break into a boozy rendition of “Over the Rainbow” from
The Wizard of Oz
, which, like
The Philadelphia Story
, was an MGM film. It’s a lovely moment that was probably intended to evoke memories of a movie that was never as popular in its day as it has become, and of a song that in 1943, the bleakest year of World War II, envisioned a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops” that just might turn out to be America.

While Loretta’s flair for romantic comedy could easily transfer to
The Philadelphia Story
, nothing that she had done in film prepared her for screwball comedy on radio. Yet she did reasonably well in both
Theodora Goes Wild
and
True Confession
in roles created by two of the best exponents of the genre, Irene Dunne and Carole Lombard, respectively.
In True Confession
(13 May 1940), Loretta assumed the Lombard role of a writer who also happens to be an incorrigible liar, not one motivated by malice, but by her hyperactive imagination. She takes a job as secretary to a broker, but his wandering hands send her running to the nearest exit. When he is murdered, the writer is a suspect. Although innocent, she pleads guilty, thus giving her lawyer-husband (Fred MacMurray, in his original role) the chance to defend her. Acquittal follows, of course.
True Confessions
is respectable screwball, but not on a par with the best of the genre. Thus Loretta treated it like a bauble, not like a pearl of great price. The key to screwball is to keep it buoyant so that it does not sink into whimsy. This Loretta managed, playing the dizzy dame with the same kind of intelligence that Lombard brought to the role by wearing the motley—but not on her brain.

Theodora Goes Wild
was another matter. This was classic screwball, aired not
on Lux
, but on
Campbell Playhouse
(14 January 1940).
Campbell Playhouse
, sponsored by Campbell’s soup, premiered on CBS in 1939 under Orson Welles’s supervision and was devoted to adaptations of well-known
novels, plays, and films.
Theodora
represented a double challenge: doing vintage screwball and appearing opposite the formidable Welles (neither of them knew they would be playing husband and wife six years later in
The Stranger
). For Loretta, screwball on radio was easier than it would have been in film. Radio allowed her to play a madcap without having to become one for the camera. To Loretta, screwball—or at least,
Theodora Goes Wild
—was a romantic caper involving the title character, a respected citizen in small town America, who writes a steamy best seller under a pseudonym, and an illustrator (Welles, in the Melvyn Douglas part), who discovers Theodora’s identity. Just as he is about to out her, Theodora discloses it herself through a publicity campaign. Theodora indeed went wild, and Loretta relished every bit of the comic mayhem. Realizing that the action has to move away from the illustrator and over to Theodora, Loretta took control of the script, not hijacking it out of ego but steering it in the direction of her character, as the plot required. Theodora is in love with the illustrator and can do for him what he cannot do for himself: bring his tottering marriage to a state of collapse.
Theodora Goes Wild
was Loretta’s show, just as it had been Irene Dunne’s movie, not Melvyn Douglas’s. Welles would move on to far greater prominence the following year in his directorial debut,
Citizen Kane
(1941).

Loretta costarred with Welles again in the
Lux
broadcast of Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
(5 June 1944), with Welles as Rochester and Loretta as the title character. Unlike Joan Fontaine in the movie, released four months earlier with Welles as Rochester, Loretta gave Jane an armorclad exterior that concealed her insecurity, as might be expected of a Victorian governess who came out of a school for “
charity-children
” and was treated accordingly. Loretta was not fluttery and breathy like Fontaine, who played servant to Rochester’s master, never forgetting her origins. Loretta’s Jane was closer to Brontë’s; Her Jane traveled the same route from Lowood School to Thornfield, without losing the survival skills that she learned at Lowood. Loretta, strong-willed but respectful, gave Welles a run for his money; the novel was entitled
Jane Eyre
, not “The Master of Thornfield.” It was Jane’s story, of which Rochester was part. Unfortunately, the radio version did not include the novel’s famous line, “
Reader, I married him
.” If it did, listeners would have heard the voice of an exotic steel blue butterfly, with no intention of ending up in anyone’s net, even one with silken meshes.

Casting Loretta in the
Lux
presentation of
Algiers
(14 December 1942) in the role that Hedy Lamarr originated was, to be charitable, casting against type. Loretta was not a world-weary siren like Lamarr, whose
exotic looks made her seem an alien breed, unlike any of her Hollywood peers. But then, Hedy Lamarr had no peers; she was a gorgeous hieroglyph awaiting decipherment that never came. Loretta, in contrast, could be elusive but never Sphinx-like. Thus the writers wisely made Loretta the narrator recounting her short-lived affair with the gangster, Pepe Le Moko (Charles Boyer). Loretta could not dispel memories of Lamarr, who never lost the Viennese lilt in her voice that carried with it an air of mystery. Lamarr’s Gaby was a woman of the world, always eager for a new adventure and, this time, finding it in the Casbah. Gaby was a creature of wanderlust; if a trip leads to an affair, so be it. It would always be short term. And if it ends in tragedy, as her trip to Algiers did, there’s always a plane to another romantic place. Those who tuned in that Monday night were more interested in Boyer than Loretta. If the leads had been Boyer and Lamarr, the audience would have quadrupled to hear the Great Lover and the Love Goddess re-create their original roles. What Lamarr had, and Loretta lacked, was a world-weary, “been there, done that” voice. Loretta did not even attempt an accent—ersatz European or otherwise—but simply delivered the lines in a cultured voice reflecting the character’s privileged background. It was Boyer’s show, because it was Boyer’s film. Whether or not Loretta realized it, she was a member of the supporting cast.

Loretta’s best radio performances were in
Christmas Holiday
(
Lux
, 17 September 1946) and
Love Letters
(
Lux
, 22 April 1946), in roles created by Deanna Durbin and Jennifer Jones, respectively. Durbin had been Universal’s resident soprano since 1936. In 1944, the studio thought it was time for her to change her image and go dramatic as a singer in a New Orleans dive married to a murderer (Gene Kelly, also cast against type). Durbin was surprisingly effective, but the studio was unimpressed and, except for the screwball mystery,
Lady on a Train
(1945), it was back to the same bland movies with porous plots for the next three years, until in 1948 Durbin had reached the stage of surfeit and left Hollywood for good.

In
Christmas Holiday
, a soldier (William Holden, right out of the army), whose plane has been grounded because of a rainstorm, drops into the club where Loretta is performing. They are instantly compatible, and she asks him to take her to Midnight Mass. That scene proved that Durbin could have been a serious actress. Whatever memories the church service evoked for her, Durbin alone knew; her barely audible but genuine weeping suggested someone in desperate need of spiritual guidance or even renewal. This was also the kind of scene to which Loretta could
relate. Her weeping, also subtly controlled, was not that of an actress playing a scene calling for her to cry, but of a suffering wife forced to make her living singing for drunks and lotharios, while her husband (David Bruce in Kelly’s role) is serving a life sentence. When he escapes and is shot, Loretta, like Durbin, undergoes another round of emotional release, again unfeigned and movingly heartfelt.

It is hard to imagine anyone improving on Jennifer Jones’s performance as “Singleton” in
Love Letters
(1945), which brought her an Oscar nomination. Singleton, whose real name is Victoria Moreland, became an amnesiac after allegedly killing her husband Roger for destroying the love letters he had supposedly written to her. The plot, a neat blend of whodunit and psychological melodrama, was resolved without straining credulity. Roger did not write the letters; his buddy (Joseph Cotten, reprising his film role) did. Victoria did not kill Roger; her aunt did. Loretta’s Singleton/Victoria was much like Jones’s—poignantly sincere and guileless, a dweller in a self-inhabited world with no memory of the evening that changed her life. With Cotten functioning as both sleuth and therapist, Victoria is forced to confront her past and relive that fatal evening. The action builds to a climax in which the past is purged, and a woman’s identity restored. Loretta played the climactic scene as if she were shedding every layer of emotional insulation that kept out the real world and drove her into her own. Her performance was so compelling that someone in the audience cried, “Bravo!” at the end. “Brava!” would have been more accurate, but the sentiment was the same.

Loretta looked on any radio show as a means of enhancing her popularity.
Lux Radio Theatre
was her favorite; it allowed her to showcase her versatility, which was not always apparent in her films. But “versatility” was not limited merely to re-creating one of her film roles or taking on someone else’s. Loretta took advantage of any program, dramatic or otherwise, that provided an opportunity for self-promotion. It was not that she was leading a life of quiet desperation, obsessed with recycling her image in every available medium—although it is easy to come to that conclusion. She simply wanted as much exposure as she could get as compensation for her second-tier status in a business where the icons are enshrined, while the statues are relegated to dimly lit alcoves. An alcove was not what Loretta had in mind; if she had to be a statue, it would be at a dedicated side altar like those at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Naturally, she preferred movies and radio; next, fan magazine articles; and finally, as a Hollywood beauty queen, endorsements of
soaps, cleansing creams, and cosmetics. But it was movies that made her famous and radio that streamed her fame throughout the country.

“Noël Coward” was not a name ordinarily associated with Loretta, yet she often cited him among her favorite writers, perhaps because she aspired to the heady brand of sophistication his heroines possessed (Amanda in
Private Lives
, Elvira in
Blithe Spirit
, Gilda in
Design for Living
) and that she strove for in
Bedtime Story
,
Eternally Yours
, and
Love Is News.
Her determination to master the high style stemmed from her dissatisfaction with her performance as the socialite in
The Devil to Pay
, believing that if she had the wit and flair that the role required, she would have been the ideal costar for Ronald Colman. And yet what seventeen-year-old actress had such technique? It’s hard to imagine Coward specialists such as Lynn Fontanne (
Design for Living
,
Quadrille
) and Gertrude Lawrence (
Private Lives
,
Tonight at 8:30
) possessing it at that age. Thus when Loretta had a chance to appear in Arch Obler’s radio adaptation of Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
on
Everything for the Boys
, she accepted immediately.
Everything for the Boys—
the inspiration of Loretta’s husband, now Lieutenant Colonel Lewis, head of the Armed Forces Radio Service—
was broadcast to members of the military
during the height of World War II, from 18 January 1942 to 12 June 1944. The host and leading man was Ronald Colman, Loretta’s adolescent crush, with whom she had costarred in three films. Convinced that she had now acquired a serviceable British accent, she joined the cast as Elvira, the spectral first wife of Charles Condomine (Colman), along with Mercedes McCambridge as Ruth, his second wife, and Edna Best as the medium Madame Arcati. After dying of a heart attack. Elvira returns as a ghost to disrupt Charles’s household and sabotage his marriage to Ruth. The role required Loretta to be sexy, fey, and cunning—all the character traits that she had mastered over the years—in addition to sounding authentically British. She could toss off a line like, “I was playing backgammon with a sweet Oriental gentleman, and then that child paged me and the next thing I knew I was in this room,” and make it seem the quintessence of wit. It got a laugh from the men and women stationed in New Guinea, the intended location of the broadcast. Each episode of
Everything for the Boys
, which consisted of half-hour versions mostly of outstanding plays (e.g.,
The Petrified Forest
,
Quality Street
), was transmitted to a particular part of the globe where the war was being fought. It is difficult to determine the exact date of the
Blithe Spirit
transmission; most likely, it was either late 1943 or spring 1944, when Allied operations had neutralized the Japanese threat to New Guinea.