Hollywood Madonna (37 page)

At this stage, Loretta preferred to function simply as star. Her marriage was, as yet, not imperiled—although that would change once the series got underway. The cumbersome title was scrapped in favor of
Letter to Loretta
, but the basic concept—stories from Loretta’s fan mail that would be dramatized, with Loretta appearing as herself in the prologue and epilogue and as the main character in the teleplay—remained the same until the middle of the second season, when the letter format was discarded.

Although Loretta never expressed any reservations about Ruslew, she obviously had some. A year later, Ruslew was supplanted by Lewislor, a combination of letters from Lewis’s and Loretta’s names (his full surname, and the initial three letters of her first name), probably an imitation of Desilu, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s television corporation. At the time, Loretta did not question the order or the disparity. Lewis, after all, would be president and the accountant, Robert F. Shewalter, secretary-treasurer, with
Loretta and Lewis splitting the stock
and each transferring one-half, so that Shewalter would receive a munificent one percent.

In interviews, Loretta downplayed her role in Lewislor, insisting that her husband was executive producer and she the star: “
I am not going to interfere
with the production. I just like to act.” But Loretta had no intention of separating production from performance, nor was she willing to relinquish the reins to her husband. Loretta was a micromanager before the term was even coined. When Loretta was displeased with the set for her television debut, she turned to her mother, Gladys Belzer, who had decorated the homes of Hollywood’s A-list (John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope). Within fifteen minutes, Gladys gave her daughter the right kind of set. Loretta was at a loss to describe her mother’s magic act: “
It’s hard to explain
just what happened but I know that mother had performed her usual miracle.” Nothing could be left to chance, now that Loretta had sworn fidelity to television. The screen’s dimensions did not matter; small screen was better than no screen. Television would be an extension of the portrait gallery to which she had been adding for thirty-five years in film and over fifteen in radio. In 1953, Loretta was only forty, and the gallery was far from complete.

When Loretta took a candid look at early 1950s television, she realized it lacked an essential element: glamour. She was determined to bring star quality to her program, which would not be the ongoing adventures of a series character, but rather anthology television, with a new story each week and disparate characters: a salesperson; a Muslim; a model; a gangster’s moll; historical figures like Clara Schumann and Charlotte Brontë; a Japanese fisherman’s wife; a maharani; an alcoholic; a nurse; a doctor; a deaf woman threatened by a murderer; and a television executive with a brain tumor. Regardless of what her character wore, Loretta would make her entrance breezing through a door, executing a perfect turn as she closed it, and sweeping into a living room where she would deliver a warmly effusive welcome. Her delivery was slightly theatrical and often too meticulously scripted, but on 1950s television, artifice was a sign of good diction. The pivoting about was not Loretta’s idea. When her dress designer, the Polish-born Marusia, complained that viewers could not see the back of the dress, Loretta obliged by twirling around. At the end of the first season, Marusia was out, but the pivoting bit remained, embedding itself so deeply in audiences’ memories that even those who cannot recall one episode have never forgotten the entrance.

The inspiration for the series came from radio drama, especially
Lux Radio Theatre
and Father Peyton’s
Family Theatre.
On
Lux
, a different movie was dramatized each Monday, with the stars appearing at the end for a brief chat with the host.
Family Theatre
adhered to the same format,
featuring a different story each week, an adaptation or an original—but always with a moral. Loretta imagined the visual equivalent of F
amily Theatre
. Could it have been otherwise with an actress who fasted on bread and water two days a week “
for spiritual reasons
?” And
Lux
inspired the appearance of the star not just at the end, as was the case in the radio show, but at the beginning as well, so that viewers could see Loretta as both herself and her character.

On 20 September 1953
Letter to Loretta
premiered, claiming to be based on letters that Loretta received from fans seeking advice about a problem or a dilemma. Movie magazine readers were familiar with advice columns, in which women (and occasionally men) sought answers to questions about conundrums ranging from romantic entanglements to the fast track to stardom. The letters were supposedly written by the viewers and the replies by the stars, although more likely a staff member was responsible for both. In fact, Loretta’s letter motif may have derived from such columns. In the late 1940s,
Photoplay
, the leading fan magazine, featured a column by Claudette Colbert, “What Should I Do? Your Problems Answered By Claudette Colbert.” Since Colbert was the embodiment of chic, her replies were carefully worded and unemotional. She was asked a variety of questions: Are teenagers “
tops
?” Answer: Yes, but not all. How should a widow deal with a man she loves but who is unable to commit to marriage? Answer: “End this affair.” One of the most authentic-sounding letters simply inquired about the role of a movie producer. The answer, regardless of who composed it, is an accurate job description of
a producer
in the studio era: “A producer is to a motion picture exactly what a general manager is to a commercial concern. He selects or is assigned a story to turn into a picture; he selects or is assigned the personnel (stars, director, a technical crew). He is allowed a certain sum of money … and is also expected to complete a picture in a given length of time.”

In 1945,
Movieland
had a similar column, “Your Problem and Mine,” with Jane Wyman as problem solver. Wyman projected a down-to-earth, big sister image; hence the title, which suggested that the correspondent and Wyman were not just locked into the letter-reply format, but that they were sharing an experience, with Wyman as an empathetic respondent.
These letters seemed
more authentic that Colbert’s. Wyman’s came from, among others, an amputee who has lost her desire to live, and a woman whose fiancé, an army veteran, was in danger of becoming an alcoholic. Wyman at least gave practical advice, providing the amputee with information about another young woman who learned to use
prostheses and could now even go out dancing, and telling the woman with the hard-drinking fiancé about organizations where service personnel and their families could go for help. Three years later, Joan Crawford took over the
Movieland
column, which had a new title that put the burden on the writer: “Can I Help You?” Crawford donned the mantle of oracle, delivering the same kind of
ambiguous replies
to rejected suitors, jilted lovers—and, in one case, a white woman in love with a Mexican. The last required careful wording. Deliberately avoiding any hint of racism, Crawford replied that the most successful marriages are between men and women with similar backgrounds, implying that theirs were not. But the time was 1948, when such unions were frowned upon. Although Ricardo Montalban, a Mexican, was married to Loretta’s half sister, Georgiana, he was a movie star as well as the brother-in-law of one. The fanzine letters, regardless of who wrote them, rang true. There was an honesty about them, some even sounding heartfelt. The ones dramatized in
Letter to Loretta
(the title was wisely changed to
The Loretta Young Show
in February 1954), on the other hand, read more like segues into stories than requests for advice.

Anyone who turned on NBC at 10:00 p.m. on 20 September 1953 saw Loretta make her grand entrance into a soundstage living room that purported to be hers, and by extension, ours. She wafted her way from the living room door to a camera waiting to capture her greeting in close up. Loretta flashed a radiant smile with capped teeth looking like burnished ivory. In a honeyed voice, she delivered a greeting, “I’ve been looking for a special way to entertain you,” as if she were offering something other than the usual fare. That much was true. Leafing through her mail so naturally that it seemed as if we were witnessing her daily routine, she came upon a letter written by Carol Brown, a “working girl” courted by a Philadelphia blueblood, who plans to introduce her to his Main Line family. When a spiteful rival hints that his mother expects her son to arrive with a trashy shop girl, Carol exchanges her conservative outfit for a polka dot dress, encircling her neck with a collar of costume jewelry, and clasping her wristwatch around her ankle. Not knowing that Carol had been misled, the family is scandalized. But the suitor (George Nader) is still enamored of her, even to the point of risking his inheritance. The writers were familiar with the classic screwball comedy
The Awful Truth
(1937), in which Irene Dunne, hoping to extricate her ex-husband (Cary Grant) from the clutches of an heiress and her suffocating family, masquerades as his flashy sister, leaving the family in a state of shock when she exits. Loretta’s version was screwball for mass consumption, devoid
of subtlety and double entendre. Regardless, the series slowly acquired a faithful audience, which was all that mattered.

Although Carol alienated her suitor’s patrician mother, Loretta knew that Carol must make amends if she is to marry into a family that prides itself on decorum. In the epilogue, Loretta moved to the bookshelf and took down the Bible. Her text for the evening was from
Proverbs
: “A sensible wife is a gift from the Lord,” implying that, to be worthy of that gift, Carol must explain her outrageous behavior and apologize. Father Peyton had done his job well. The revelation that evening was not Loretta, who had proved earlier that she could handle comedy that broadened into farce (e.g.,
He Stayed for Breakfast, Half Angel
). It was the Paris-born director, Robert Florey, who directed all of the shows during the first season. Interestingly, his forte was not farce, but melodrama, florid and often macabre (
Murders in the Rue Morgue
,
The Face Behind the Mask
,
The Beast with Five Fingers
). Farce was not entirely alien to him (he co-directed the Marx Brothers’ film debut,
Cocoanuts
), but it was never his strong suit. Fortunately, he only had to work with a half-hour script and a cast that knew it was not doing Restoration comedy. The formula was simple: democratize the script, raise the volume on the laugh track, and what would have been screwball morphs into farce.

Playing women facing a crisis or unmasking a murderer was second nature to Loretta, who had gone that route in such films as
Heroes for Sale
,
The Lady from Cheyenne
,
China
,
The Stranger
,
The Accused
, and
Cause for Alarm!
Handling a crisis was therefore a common theme in the series. In “Earthquake” (25 October 1953), a wife with a husband confined to an iron lung must operate the machine manually when an earthquake causes a power failure. This was the kind of script that Florey could easily direct, one in which most of the action takes place in the dark, enabling him to use low-key lighting, his favorite form, and alternate between semi-darkness and shadowy surfaces.

Florey was also in his element in “Lady Killer” (10 January 1954), with Loretta as a mystery novelist with a penchant for sleuthing. When an airline passenger, whose ticket she was using, is found dead, and the female detective investigating the case experiences a similar fate, the novelist connects the incriminating dots that point to her seatmate and his associate, the corrupt district attorney. Just when it seems that the novelist is the next in line, the police (whom she had alerted) break in. The moral was simple: men do not have a monopoly on the art of deduction.

When Florey had the opportunity to take the script to operatic heights, he indulged himself, as if he were back at Warner’s. Everything was
over the top in “The Clara Schumann Story” (21 March 1954), from the opening scene (Loretta as Robert Schumann’s fluttery bride) to the end (Schumann’s descent into madness). In between, Loretta moved from romantic to realist, as she came to terms with her husband’s condition. Viewers, whose only exposure to Robert Schumann might have been MGM’s glossy biopic,
Song of Love
(1947), were treated to an authentic—as authentic as a teleplay can be—portrait of a talent derailed and eventually silenced, an important aspect of the composer’s life that the 1947 film ignored. Loretta’s performance was the equivalent of opera without music, wildly gestural, with gradations of hysteria and pained resignation. It was a script that required little acting, only histrionics. “The Clara Schumann Story” was Florey’s half hour, not Loretta’s or George Nader’s, whose Schumann came close to conveying the radical mood swings from which the composer suffered.

Claiming that she had received letters from young women dreaming of becoming movie stars, Loretta decided they should learn the truth, not in the
What Price Hollywood
? or
A Star Is Born
way, but rather in the form of a parable. In “Hollywood Story” (31 January 1954), an Iowan (Loretta), the star of her community theater, is convinced that she can conquer Hollywood. But the time was 1954, when the new mass medium was television. Television could have been the character’s medium, too, except that a producer was honest enough to tell her that she must get more training, learn to put her career first, and, if she ever reaches the top, resort to any means to stay there. The manifesto was too much for a small-town girl who was never meant for the big time. Resigned to being a local celebrity, she rejoins the community theatre and marries her high school beau (refreshingly played by William Bishop). The parable was not dated; “Hollywood” still has a mystique as a synonym for America’s entertainment capital. The television subplot was a canny move on the part of the writer, who downplayed film’s cachet in favor of TV’s broader appeal. “Hollywood Story” subtly justified Loretta’s decision to enter the medium, while at the same time warning hopefuls that the odds of achieving her kind of stardom were slim. There was a significant difference: Loretta was already a star when she entered television, and she became a bigger one because of it. Loretta also had it much easier than her character. She became a movie star primarily because of her transformative art, which enabled her to play a wide range of characters. But stardom is not rooted solely in talent; in Loretta’s case, there were other factors such as a family contact (her assistant-director uncle), mentors (Mae Murray, Colleen Moore), directors (Frank Capra, Frank
Borzage, William Wellman), and producers (Dore Schary, Hal Wallis), with whom she made some extraordinary films, and leading men from whom she learned that acting is the art of reacting (Lon Chaney, Robert Williams, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable). Of course, physical beauty was not a deterrent, nor was an inner radiance born of faith. And starting at four gave Loretta a head start.