Hollywood Madonna (39 page)

Her finest portrayal of an Asian was in “The Pearl” (13 February 1956), as the wife of a Japanese fisherman who finds a pearl in an oyster and begins fantasizing about what he can buy with it. To prevent him from squandering his money when he goes to Tokyo, the wife substitutes a stone. In his absence, she uses the pearl to purchase a boat, christening it “The Pearl,” so he can have the latest model. Loretta found the core of the character, the still point within the wife that is unaffected by the turning world—her eyes bespeaking wisdom without sending up flares. It was her subtlest interpretation: minimalist, perhaps, but magnanimous in its expression of the inner tranquility that accompanies true wisdom. The moral: “Therefore, get wisdom, but with all the getting, get understanding.” The wife had both.

As the series grew in popularity, ratings increased to the point that, by 1954,
Loretta was honored
with an Emmy for “Best Actress Starring in a Regular Series,” which, of the thirty top TV programs, ranked twenty-eighth. (Interestingly,
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
was
twenty-sixth.) Loretta was now a television celebrity, whose image graced the cover of
TV Guide
twelve times between 1953 and 1962. Two more Emmys followed in 1956 and 1958. Movie actors, whose careers were moribund, but whose names still carried weight (e.g., Virginia Bruce, Virginia Mayo, Merle Oberon, Jan Sterling, Teresa Wright, Phyllis Thaxter, John Hodiak, Robert Preston, and Herbert Marshall) signed up as guests. No longer a movie star, Loretta was honored for her work in television. For three consecutive years, 1957–59, she received the National Education Association’s “School Bell” for “distinguished service in the interpretation of education”; for six consecutive years (1954–59), she was awarded the
TV-Radio Mirror
gold medal as “favorite dramatic actress on television.” Organizations as diverse as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, California Teacher’s Association, Hollywood Women’s Press Club,
Fame
magazine, Dell Publications, Radio and Television Women of Southern California, and the American Legion added to her laurels. Perhaps Loretta’s proudest moment occurred in 1960 when
TV Guide
’s readers’ poll voted her “the most popular female personality.”

If such nationally recognized organizations as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and American Legion honored Loretta, it was because her show raised television to the level of edifying entertainment, going beyond anything that existed at the time. ABC tried an anthology series,
Summer Theatre
, from July to September 1953, when
The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet
was off the air.
Summer Theatre
never found an audience, suggesting that the concept was not viable.
The Loretta Young Show
disproved that myth, raising the bar several notches higher than sitcom and providing viewers with a series that guaranteed a different story each Sunday evening with an Oscar-winning actress in the lead.

The Loretta Young Show
debuted at the right time.
In fall 1953
, the Red Scare had become the latest American bogeyman with its supporting cast of nuclear spies, media-infiltrating subversives, and screenwriters accused of injecting communist propaganda into their scripts. This was the time of Reds and pinkos, denunciations of “godless, atheistic Communism” from church pulpits, informants, Fifth Amendment pleaders, sycophants, exiled writers working through fronts or pseudonyms, and unrepentant radicals. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a much-honored World War II hero, was in the White House. Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy were attempting to combat the (non-existent) communist threat to America’s internal security, shattering reputations in their zealotry. Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver’s televised hearings on organized crime garnered high ratings. Morality, with its concomitant
self-righteousness, dictated the tenor of mass entertainment that, in 1953, meant television.

A few movies of the late forties and early fifties addressed social issues such as juvenile delinquency (
The Blackboard
Jungle [1955],
Rebel without a Cause
[1956]); blacks passing for white in segregated America (
Lost Boundaries
[1950]) and those who refused to pass (
Pinky
[1949]); suburban class-consciousness (
All The Heaven Allows
[1955]); the Ku Klux Klan (
Storm Warning
[1951]); and corruption on the docks (
On the Waterfront
[1954]). On the other hand, 1950s television offered an alternative: idealized families (
Father Knows Best
); model high schools (
Our Miss Brooks
); ditzy wives/exasperated husbands (
I Love Lucy
,
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
,
I Married Joan
,
My Favorite Husband
); impish daughters and benevolent fathers (
My Little Margie
); and smart kids with a bellowing father (
Make Room for Daddy
). Such programs were evening entertainment for mass audiences who turned a deaf ear to McCarthyism.
The Loretta Young Show
never played politics; Loretta, who was probably apolitical, knew her target audience.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s
Life Is Worth Living
, which bore the same title as his popular television show, became a best seller in 1954, as did Norman Vincent Peale’s
The Power of Positive Thinking
and the revised standard version of
The Holy Bible
. Song hits included “Little Things Mean a Lot” and “Young at Heart,” both with lyrics that in an age of gangsta rap seem hopelessly square. Radio’s best-loved soap,
Ma Perkins
, was still on the air, and would be until 1960. When
Letter to Loretta
premiered,
South Pacific
,
The King and I
, and
Guys and Dolls
were still on Broadway, and the new musicals—
Wonderful Town
,
Kismet
, and
The Pajama Game
—would pass muster as family entertainment. These were shows that seem, in retrospect, disarmingly innocent despite a few risqué moments that would have sailed over the heads of most tourists and even precocious adolescents. How many of them would have picked up on the interracial affair in
South Pacific
and the nurse’s subtle transformation from racist to liberal? Concubinage in
The King and I
? The hooker with her calling cards in
Wonderful Town
? The aphrodisiac song in
Kismet
? Loretta entered the medium at the right time.

But
The Loretta Young Show
might not have continued as long as it did if the star had become as disillusioned as some of the characters in her series. Before the second season ended, Loretta was vacationing at her Ojai ranch when she experienced severe abdominal pains that seemed to signal an attack of appendicitis—but turned out to be more serious. On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955,
she was rushed to St. John’s Hospital
,
where she was diagnosed with peritonitis. A four-hour surgery followed that supposedly was successful. The prognosis was good, and Loretta was expected to be discharged in three weeks. But doctors also discovered
abdominal adhesions
that required another operation, a hysterectomy—although the press was only told about the “abdominal adhesions. “ Still, there was speculation about the nature of the surgery, which increased when the hospital refused to divulge information about Loretta’s condition or even accept phone calls. Questions were answered guardedly, suggesting knowledge of her condition but an unwillingness to reveal it. Three weeks dragged out to four months, and Loretta was
finally discharged
on 1 August.

Even when hospitalized, Loretta’s primary concern was her show. Fortunately, she had assembled a staff as loyal to her as they were to the program and knew fellow actors who would pinch-hit until she could return for the third season, which she did in 1956. Until then, a number of outstanding guest hosts substituted (e.g., Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, her brother-in-law, Ricardo Montalban, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck—who was so taken with the anthology concept that she used it for her own series,
The Barbara Stanwyck Show
(1960–61).

Loretta’s confinement secretly delighted Tom Lewis, who, despite his executive producer title, believed that his wife’s success relegated him to the wings, depriving him of the spotlight that shone on her. In her autobiography Judy Lewis, twenty at the time of her mother’s hospitalization, writes about overhearing her stepfather boast to Helen Ferguson, “
Finally, I have
my little Gretchen back.” Then Lewis started to behave more like a lover obsessed with reclaiming his lost love than a media professional committed to keeping a successful series on the air. Apparently, Lewis no longer thought of his wife as Loretta, but as Gretchen—as if he preferred the woman she might have been if she had never became a movie star. Lewis did not care about the series, either; it was Loretta’s, not his. He only wanted his Gretchen back. Loretta Young was not his property; she belonged to the world. Lewis decided to take matters into his own hands and inform Norman Brokow, Loretta’s agent at William Morris, that her present condition made it impossible for her to return to the show—in effect, canceling it. Once Loretta learned what he had done, she “
called her own meeting
” in her hospital room, announcing that
The Loretta Young Show
was hers, and assuring her sponsor, Proctor & Gamble, that, in her absence, high profile guests would substitute, as they did. Tom Lewis was a typical example of the “star wife” syndrome,
dramatized so effectively in
A Star Is Born
(1937). In the film, Norman Maine, once one of Hollywood’s leading men, is eclipsed by his wife, Vicki Lester, and is known to mail carriers as “Mr. Lester.” Tom Lewis had become “Mr. Young.” As Loretta told an interviewer in 1987, “
It was awfully hard
when there was no way of stopping a headwaiter from calling my husband Mr. Young.”

Lewis may have been the original producer of
The Loretta Young Show
, but it was Loretta’s protean repertoire that made television history, proving that there was an audience for an anthology series.
CBS’s Four Star Playhouse
had debuted earlier in September 1952, but even with its four stars (Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, David Niven, and Ida Lupino), it only lasted until 1956. Loretta would double that record. None of the four stars had Loretta’s cachet—not even Charles Boyer, who was no longer the Great Lover, except to the Broadway audiences that flocked to see him in person in
The Marriage-Go-Round
(1959–60) with Claudette Colbert. (Significantly, neither Boyer nor Colbert reprised their roles in the movie version, in which James Mason and Susan Hayward played the leads.) Anthology TV was Loretta’s domain, which she intended to rule until she had to concede the throne. Nineteen fifties’ television had never seen anything like
The Loretta Young Show
, in which one actress released the myriad women within her and brought them into the American living room.

If Lewis wanted a stay-at-home wife, he had completely misread Loretta.
The Loretta Young Show
was her property; if Lewis wished to continue as producer, he would play by her rules. Even at the beginning, he should have inferred from her weekly schedule that their lives had changed. The episodes were filmed each year from July to March, with rehearsals on Mondays and Tuesdays; filming, Wednesday-Fridays; Loretta’s welcomes and au revoirs every other Thursday; and her quote of the week on alternating Sundays. Weekends were not that different: There were wig fittings; wardrobe shopping; scripts to be read; story, interview, cast, business, program, and rewrite conferences. For eight years, Loretta’s life was not her own—and it was certainly not her husband’s. The steel butterfly was afloat, and no one, particularly Lewis, would bring her down.

As of April 1956, the marriage was unofficially over. For the time being it was a separation. Divorce would not occur for thirteen more years, until Loretta finally realized that, like her mother, she too would be a divorcée. But there was no way that Loretta’s ruptured marriage could
be sutured, much less healed. On 11 May 1956, Lewis resigned as producer from
The Loretta Show
, at the instigation of Loretta and Robert Shewalter, Lewislor’s secretary-treasurer and accountant,
seeking control of Lewislor
for themselves but knowing that the name would have to be changed. At first, Lewis seemed compliant. On 30 April 1956,
he agreed to relinquish
his role in the company, in return for which he was offered sole title to one of the apartment houses that he and Loretta owned on N. Flores Street, a house on Sweetzer Avenue, and the Ojai ranch. (There were actually two Flores Street apartment buildings; the final settlement, a decade later, allowed Loretta to chose the one she wanted, which, naturally, was the better one.)

By 13 March 1958, Lewis had second thoughts about his exclusion from Lewislor.
He filed suit
against Loretta and Shewalter, accusing them of treating him unfairly and depriving him of his rights as a shareholder; he also argued that, with his departure, Loretta and Shewalter doubled their salaries. Loretta countered with copies of their 30 April 1956 agreement, in which the couple divided their property, and Lewis disassociated himself from the company. The case dragged on until 1966, when it was
finally dismissed
by the appellate court. By that time, it was no longer front-page news. Nor was their divorce, which was granted on 20 August 1969,
with Loretta receiving a dollar
a year as token alimony.

The emotional toll that the litigation had taken on Loretta even caused her to question the career to which she devoted her life. Whether Loretta truly enjoyed acting or regarded it as a challenge that had to be met is problematical. Perhaps at the beginning, the excitement of stardom compensated for the grueling hours and often thankless parts. But when Judy announced that she wanted to be an actress, Loretta scoffed: “You’re too
nice
.… You’re going to have to be tough.” Loretta learned toughness from a childhood characterized not by privation but by desertion, from a mother who refused to succumb to depression and self-pity when her adulterous husband walked out on his family and instead reinvented herself, first as a boarding house owner and then as one of Hollywood’s leading interior decorators. A costar who impregnated her and turned her life into a scenario of fabrication, studios that exploited her, and a production head who failed to appreciate her range further seasoned her. At one point she even called acting a “
dreadful profession
.” To Loretta, it had probably become that, creating a tension between her religion and her art. The polarity drove her to priests for guidance in resolving that tension or at least bringing the two opposing forces into a
state of equilibrium. When that proved impossible, Loretta decided that she could do it herself with a television series that would both entertain and instruct—and with a sign off quote for the viewers’ edification.