Hollywood Madonna (43 page)

Loretta adhered to the theme of the evening: the progress women made in the Hollywood boys club, concentrating on the absence of women in key positions during her tenure. Still, she could not resist giving a homily. Noting the strides women had made since her day, she went into uplift mode: “
You bring your sensitivity
, intuition and spirit in wanting to create and inspire and educate. Knowingly or unknowingly, you put that in the films you do.” That was nothing compared to the homily she delivered three weeks later at the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), an organization devoted to promoting racial and religious harmony. Loretta arrived in a wheelchair because of a leg injury, but when Sidney Poitier, who was hosting the event, introduced her, she rose and walked to the podium, which became her pulpit. She acknowledged Christianity’s Jewish roots, noting that the religions are “
braided
, interwoven, intertwined—and never to be separated.” She was sincere when she called Christianity a “demanding” religion, but then added: “I don’t think I could live one day more—not one day more—without it.” She ended with a rousing peroration: “So tonight I boldly and unhesitatingly beg God to bless all of us in all of our efforts and everything that you’re trying to do for Him—all of us, all of His children, all over the world.”

Loretta’s zeal may have struck some as a bid for the title of Our Lady of Hollywood, yet she was as sincere as any missionary who believed that the age of the apostles had not ended, but had evolved into the age of the personal apostolate, in which the individual embarks on his or her own crusade, promoting and defending the faith, whatever it may be. For Loretta, faith was not so much Christian as Catholic, her brand. To Loretta, Catholicism was the true faith, just as the cross the Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, discovered in Jerusalem in the fourth century (said to be the cross on which Christ was crucified) was known as the true cross. Loretta knew that some scoffed at her commitment to the Church, regarding it as self-canonization, yet whenever she spoke of religion, it was with such conviction that even the most jaded interviewers did not question her belief, even if they could not comprehend the spiritual depths from which it came. Ten years before she died, Loretta, then seventy-eight, spoke philosophically about her religion, which—demanding as it is—establishes limits within which we must live our lives, and beyond which we should not venture: “
My belief
in God is the main thing …. Religion gives us strength. It tells us how far we can and cannot go …. Take the qualities you have and build on them and pray to find out what God wants of you. Oh, I know some people think I’m a prude. ‘Holier than thou Loretta,’ they say …. Well, that’s their business.
Me
? I believe in establishing limits and setting standards, because you can’t be happy without them. And I’m
happy!
” To Loretta, happiness, faith, and prayer were all interconnected. She had much for which to be happy: financial security, and a distinguished career that might have been aborted if Hollywood had not closed ranks and protected her from newshounds and moralists after she bore Judy. Loretta would have argued that her conspirators were really God’s emissaries, carrying out a divinely ordained mission on behalf of a repentant sinner, whose faith saved her from the crucifying press. Loretta understood that her transgression caused her to transcend the boundaries set by her religion and career and deviate from their standards. She vowed that she would never again wander into enemy territory.

The 1980s were especially meaningful to Loretta, not just because she was lavished with honors and awards, but because of her triumphant return to television on 22 December 1986 in
Christmas Eve
on NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies. Her television career had come full-circle, beginning and ending at NBC—not in a half-hour series but in two two-hour films. C
hristmas Eve
could easily have been a tear-duct opener—had it not been for Blanche Hanalis’s script with its honest sentimentality,
and Stuart Cooper’s direction that observed the line of demarcation between poignancy and emotional manipulation. It is easy to understand Loretta’s attraction to the script. The character, Amanda Kingsley, was very much like Loretta: a woman of enormous wealth who goes out with her Jeeves-like butler (Trevor Howard) on nightly forays to dispense money, food, and encouragement to the homeless. (They also befriend stray cats and bring them back for rehabilitation.) Learning that she has an inoperable aneurysm, Amanda makes use of what little time she has to locate her three grandchildren, who became so estranged from their coldly indifferent father (Arthur Hill) that they left home without forwarding addresses. Determined to have them back for what might be her last Christmas Eve, Amanda hires a private investigator (Ron Leibman, in a beautifully understated performance) to locate them, enabling Hanalis to intercut the New York sequences with the investigator’s trips to Nashville, Los Angeles, and Toronto to track them down.

Hanalis was not an arbitrary choice. She had written the screenplays for
The Trouble with Angels
(1966) and its sequel,
Where Angels Go…Trouble Follows
(1968). Loretta’s fascination with angels was not the reason for signing on to
Christmas Eve
; the “angels” in the two movies were rambunctious girls in a convent school. The reason was the films themselves, which were informed by a Catholic sensibility. While Catholicism was not a theme in
Christmas Eve
, Loretta’s character was the embodiment of the perfect Christian, as she went about performing spiritual and corporal works of mercy. Loretta was totally believable as a benefactor of the underclass; but so was Leibman, who made the character’s investigative technique—a combination of deduction and networking—refreshingly credible. That Hanalis handed Loretta and Leibman a script without loopholes or loose ends made it easy for them to flesh out their characters. Although the terminal illness plot does not allow for a misdiagnosis,
Christmas Eve
is really about the reunion, not Amanda’s aneurysm. We know she will not make a pilgrimage to Lourdes; Loretta had already gone down that route in
The Road
. Hanalis sustained audience interest by posing three questions: Will the trio arrive in time? Will the son drop his mental incompetency case against his mother? Will the yuletide spirit bring the family together? The script was not entitled “
Christmas Eve
” for nothing.

It was a perfect role for Loretta. At seventy-three, her cheekbones were still clearly defined, and artfully applied makeup erased time’s fingerprints. Having gained ten pounds after breaking her smoking habit, she was less svelte than she had been in her salad days. With hair looking
like a swirl of silver, and pastel sheaths flowing down her frame, Loretta appeared to have had a heavenly makeover. Although she had been off the screen for almost a quarter of a century, she was still every inch an actress. She had not lost the art of radiating spirituality, even though she was not playing a nun, just a wealthy liberal with a mission: finding housing for the homeless, including cats. Some of the lines reflected Loretta’s philosophy as much as they did Amanda’s. In the scene in which Amanda tells a dying woman (Kate Reid) that she is a “child of God who loves you dearly,” one could envision Loretta saying the same to a patient in one of the hospitals where she volunteered. When she explains to a group of children how the dove came to symbolize peace, she uses a parable, describing the time a dove alighted on a battlefield, inspiring the combatants to drop their weapons and walk toward each other in a gesture of reconciliation. Significantly, when the Christmas Eve reunion has ended, Amanda notices a dove on her terrace, which then flies off. Amanda is now at peace and ready for what Peter Pan in James M. Barrie’s play (act 3) calls “
an awfully big adventure
.”

Loretta held her own, despite formidable competition from Trevor Howard, as the quintessential English butler, who could easily have walked off with the film (as John Gielgud did when he played a similar character in
Arthur
). But like a typical manservant, Maitland knows his place—and it is not in the limelight. Still, it was a rich performance, in addition to one of Howard’s last. Trevor Howard died the following year. The script also made demands on Leibman and Hill. Leibman is not a Hollywood “private eye,” laconic and dispassionate like Humphrey Bogart in
The Maltese Falcon
and
The Big Sleep
. As he meets each of the three grandchildren, he behaves more like a father figure, making them feel slightly guilty for ignoring the grandmother they claim they adore, but never chastising them for their thoughtlessness. Hill had to project a severe rigidity that his children equated with lovelessness. But, again, Christmas Eve can bring about miraculous changes, with the embittered growing mellow and the loveless dispensing love, as the estranged are reconciled and reptilian eyes give way to pools of compassion.

Loretta also had a challenging role. Amanda may have been an affluent matron, dressed like a grand dame at home, but she wears pants and a working class coat when she and Maitland went about performing nocturnal acts of charity. She knew the difference between eccentric and certifiable, making Amanda’s mission more like normal behavior—at least for those with a social conscience. Loretta only made a few films in Technicolor, which was too flamboyant for her delicate features. Color
television was more congenial, avoiding the theatricality of a process that called attention to its lush palette. The mellow lighting and the soft colors of the costumes coalesced in a visual style familiar to 1986 viewers, who knew they were not watching a 1940s MGM Technicolor film. Loretta was proud of
Christmas Eve:
“
It took out
football on Monday night.” It also won her a Golden Globe for best actress in a television movie.

Lady in a Corner
, her next and last NBC Monday movie, was telecast two weeks before Christmas, on 11 December 1989. In many ways, it was a more contemporary film, reflecting the mergermania and corporate takeovers whereby once freestanding companies—networks, newspapers, publishing houses and movie studios—became subsidiaries of corporations. Paramount was engulfed by Gulf + Western in 1966. In 1985, Twentieth Century-Fox became part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which also included the
New York Post
, HarperCollins, and Basic Books. Time Inc. acquired Warner Communications in 1989, resulting in Time Warner. The same year, Sony bought Columbia Pictures. A year later, another Japanese company, Matsushita, the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer electronic goods, bought MCA, a package that included Universal Pictures, Universal Television, MCA Records, and Universal Tours in Los Angeles and Orlando. And this was just the beginning. Owners would change, subsidiaries would be spun off, and eventually the day would come when even the big three networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, would become cogs in the corporate wheel: NBC in General Electric’s, CBS in Viacom’s, and ABC in Disney’s.

In
Lady in a Corner
, Grace Guthrie (Loretta), the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine that bears her name, bucks the trend of showing sullen-looking models with arms crossed on bare breasts. She regards such magazines as pornographic. She meets her match when a hotshot editor, Susan Dawson (Lindsay Frost), becomes the anointed of a Rupert Murdoch-like media tycoon (Christopher Neame), who plans to replace Grace with Susan after taking over the magazine. Will the magazine be swallowed up by a ruthless British empire-builder, or will Grace be able to raise enough money from like-minded millionaires to purchase the company herself? If she succeeds, will Grace work with Susan to bring the magazine into the next century without compromising her values? Will Grace and her partner (Brian Keith) legitimize their autumnal romance in marriage? And did Loretta extract a quarter from Keith for the Swear Box when he said “Hell,” as mandated by the script? Again, the show was aired two weeks before Christmas, when media pirates do not hijack decent magazines and turn them into softcore. But it is a time
when late-life romances end at the altar, and swear boxes are shelved with other relics of the past. Loretta at least had the satisfaction of knowing that she appeared in a truly contemporary television movie reflecting her own standards of decency, which she assumed were shared by her viewers. But whether the viewers appreciated the intelligence of the script depends on how knowledgeable they were about the corporatization of the media. Probably not too many were. To most of them, it was a Capra upgrade, another individual vs. the establishment movie.

There was nothing simplistic about
Lady in a Corner.
To survive, a magazine might have to become part of a conglomerate. A magazine must also accommodate the evolving taste of its readers. When
The New Yorker
, renowned for its sophistication and stylistic elegance, began printing stories with four-letter words, purists were shocked. Yet there was no lowering of standards; the magazine still printed quality fiction, poetry, criticism, and globe-spanning articles. Viewers were not left with the idea that it would be business as usual at
Grace
magazine. Grace appoints Susan as her successor, and at a staff meeting asks that she sit next to her. Susan declines, choosing to sit opposite her—the young Turk facing the old guard. Is this a face-off or a compromise? Susan sports a triumphant smile, but Grace flashes a wily one. Capitulation or cooperation? Loretta capitulate? Did she ever? Compromise? Every actress does for the sake of the film.

For her final television appearance, Loretta did not look her best. Pants were a mistake; her weight gain left an abdominal bulge and a drooping backside. Suits were no help, either. Sheaths did the trick in
Christmas Eve
, but she needed a different wardrobe to minimize the extra inches that encircled her waist. And there was also the matter of Loretta’s voice. She seems to have had some kind of dental problem, creasing the sides of her mouth as she spoke, as if she were going to whistle the lines. She did not sound like the old Loretta, but she was still the pro, always in character, particularly at the end when she had to come to terms with a changing readership and name the former editor from
Foxy Girl
as her successor.