Hollywood Madonna (46 page)

When Loretta learned in 1986 that Judy was writing her memoir, which Loretta considered an exposé, she threatened a lawsuit, not realizing that she did not wield the power she once did. If it was a case of “once a star, always a star,” the light had dimmed. Estrangement followed, and when the memoir appeared in 1994, Loretta’s name was constantly in the press. She was now eighty-one, the self-appointed keeper of her own flame, which she assumed would not be extinguished in her lifetime. Judy relieved her mother of guarding a shrine with only one votary. It was time to blow out the light; since Loretta would not, Judy did. The myth was extinct. The saint was revealed as a sinner—human, all too human—yet strangely triumphant. The Loretta that emerged from
Uncommon Knowledge
was a vulnerable woman who, in her determination to maintain her star status, resorted to subterfuge and equivocation. One could not help but admire both her inventiveness and her tenacity. An astute reader, as opposed to someone interested only in a sensational read, would have finished
Uncommon Knowledge
with renewed admiration for Loretta—less so for her daughter, who simply resorted to another form of therapy, one that does not require payment to a therapist because the therapist was the author, who was paid in royalties.

In a 1994 interview, Judy hinted at the real reason for writing
Uncommon Knowledge
: to see if by reconstructing the past she could fill the void in her life caused by Gable’s disowning her. Loretta would have understood such a void; her father had left one in her life, too, when he disappeared. As Judy told
People
magazine, “
If I could talk
to him [Gable] now, I’d say, ‘Where were you when I needed you? Why did you stay away?’ Then, of course, I’d tell him how much I missed him.” Had Judy made her ambivalence about Gable a major theme, so that he would have played as significant a role in the memoir as Loretta, she would have emerged as a scarred child bearing wounds inflicted by both parents, perhaps more from her father than her mother. Loretta did not abandon Judy; Gable did. To her credit as an autobiographer, Judy placed her life within the context of her great grandparents, grandparents, and mother. After Gladys’s mother died, her father defected, as did Loretta’s father, and Judy’s as well. It was almost like the ancestral curse in myth, except that no one was murdered or driven mad by the Furies. Still, the women
were ill served by men, which, ironically, made them stronger. Like her mother, Judy survived.

To Loretta survival was all. Countless women would have understood—women who turned their indiscretions into myths that they either carried to the grave or admitted when it was safe to do so. So, too, would fellow Catholics who shared Loretta’s primitive view of mortal sin, particularly violations of the sixth commandment, and to whom confessing and performing the prescribed penance (which could vary with the confessor) were not enough and, like Loretta, spent a lifetime atoning. Quoting John 6:1–11 would probably not have helped. In that chapter, the Pharisees brought an adulterous woman before Jesus, expecting him to denounce her. Instead, he merely told her to reform her ways. Loretta had done that, but she had to do more. In imitation of Christ, she chose to serve rather than be served.

Most actresses in Loretta’s situation would not have regarded
Uncommon Knowledge
as a daughter’s betrayal as much as a mother’s chance to hit the lecture circuit and tell her side of the story. If Loretta had, feminists would have embraced her, many of them knowing nothing about the restrictive production code, the sanctimonious Legion of Decency, contracts with morals clauses, and the Hollywood patriarchy. It was a perfect opportunity to provide a counter-narrative to Judy’s, and given Loretta’s ability to sweep onto a stage, she would have found an audience eager to relight her flame. It could have been Loretta
redidiva
. Instead, Loretta dismissed the book as rumor, and went on performing her usual charitable acts. Judy had a secondary career: After Loretta’s death, she was booked on cruises to lecture about her movie star parents and show clips from their films.

For four years, mother and daughter were estranged. It took three deaths in a single year—Jean Louis’, Polly Ann’s, and Elizabeth Jane’s (Sally Blane), together with her brother Jack’s the following year—to make Loretta realize that it was time to bury the past. Anyway, there was something unseemly about a mother in her eighties harboring a grudge against a daughter in her sixties, particularly when the mother practices a faith based on forgiveness. Besides, Loretta reasoned, some readers may have profited from
Uncommon Knowledge
, particularly those who had to live a lie or work in a profession where, like T.S. Eliot’s Pru-frock, they were scrutinized and classified like specimens, “pinned and wriggling on a wall.” Unintentionally, Loretta became the heroine of
Uncommon Knowledge
; it was one of the best scripts she was ever handed.

Loretta spent the last years of her life putting her faith into action. Loretta had never worked in a film with Jane Wyman, although she knew that Wyman was inspired by her success in television to try her hand in the new medium. In 1955, Wyman became the host of
Fireside Theatre
. While there had been other hosts, she proved the most popular, so much so that
Fireside Theatre
was renamed
The Jane Wyman Show
. Loretta and Wyman had more in common than their professions. After divorcing her husband, Freddie Karger, in 1952,
Wyman converted to Catholicism
, becoming such a promoter of the faith that she brought Karger back into the fold and even remarried him in 1961. After they separated four years later, Wyman never remarried and moved to Palm Springs. Loretta immediately enlisted her help. They both belonged to St. Louis Catholic Church in Cathedral City. The church carpeting had become so frayed that a heel caught in loose threads could result in an injury. Loretta and Wyman had the church recarpeted; parishioners could now walk to the altar at communion time without fear of tripping.

It is hard to think of two more incompatible types than Loretta and Carol Channing. But when Channing moved to Palm Springs in 1998, Loretta coaxed her into donning a white beard and red cap to impersonate Santa Claus at a children’s Christmas party. Knowing Channing was a committed Christian Scientist, Loretta made no effort to convert her. But the affection remained; “
She was my fairy godmother
growing up,” Channing remarked. “Fairy godmother” suited Loretta; one could easily imagine her in a silvery white gown and tiara, brandishing a wand and tapping the original Lorelei Lee in Jule Styne’s
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and Dolly Gallagher Levi in Jerry Herman’s
Hello, Dolly!
for her ministry.

It was a short-lived friendship. In 1999, Loretta was diagnosed with ovarian and stomach cancer. She accepted the inevitable, asking only that she not die in a hospital. Since Loretta could not get the care she needed in Palm Springs, Georgiana and Ricardo brought her to their home in Hollywood Hills. It was there that she died on Saturday, 12 August 2000.

The funeral mass took place the following Wednesday at St. Louis Church in Cathedral City. There was a huge turnout of around four hundred people, including all the remaining members of her family (except Georgiana, who remained in Los Angeles because Ricardo was having surgery). Channing, Wyman, Marlo Thomas, and Norman Brokaw, her agent of fifty years, were there. And, of course, the fans. Casablanca lilies, Loretta’s favorite flowers, filled the church. Bishop Gerald Barnes
officiated, recalling the last conversation he had with Loretta, in which she said that “
she was ready to die
and she looked forward to going home.” Loretta was cremated;
on 7 October
, her remains were buried in her mother’s grave in Holy Cross Cemetery, Section F, Tier 65. Polly Ann and Sally Blane are also interred at Holy Cross in other sections. Anyone trying to locate Loretta’s grave would have to go to her mother’s. The design is simple: two hands holding a small cross and the inscription, “Beloved Mother and Grandmother Gladys Belzer 1888–1984.” There is no indication that Loretta’s ashes lie there. That is what she wanted. Her home was no longer on earth.

The obituaries were lengthy, and the tributes deeply felt—especially Robert Osborne’s in his
Hollywood Reporter
column (15 August 2000): “Young was courageous, generous, talented, beautiful, always her own woman—and one of the handful of giants never given her proper due by the industry she leaves behind.” At least Loretta knew that she moved effortlessly and gracefully between the two pillars that enclosed her life: her profession and her faith. She did not consider them confining boundaries, but rather defining the space within which she worked and prayed—a space large enough to accommodate her nearly 100 films, close to 260 episodes of her two television shows, two two-hour TV movies, around thirty-five radio appearances, and countless hours spent in charity work. Few stars had racked up as many humanitarian awards as Loretta. But then, few know how to balance their career and their faith. Loretta knew how to integrate her art and her religion. She was living proof that Christ was right when he said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Loretta would have emended the text to read, “Render to Hollywood the things that are Hollywood’s,” but she would have retained the rest of the mandate.

NOTES

Chapter 1. Life without Father

3
“in any number of places”
: Information about Loretta’s life and family comes from a variety of sources: the invaluable Gladys Hall Collection, Folder 506, and the Jane Ardmore Papers, Folders 14 and 15, both of which are in Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study; the Loretta Young Clippings File, Margaret Herrick; the Constance Mc-Cormick Collection, Vols. 1–3 (1935), Cinema–Television Library, University of Southern California; obituaries in the
Hollywood Reporter International Edition
, 15 August 2000, 22;
New York Times
, 13 August 2000, 39;
Daily Variety
, 14 August 2000, 8, 16;
People
, 28 August 2000, 117; Samuel Grafton, “The Loretta Young Story,”
Good Housekeeping
, March 1955, 65, 234–40; Dean Jennings, “Indestructible Glamour Girl,”
Saturday Evening Post
, 28 May 1960, 20, 108, 111, 113; Judy Lewis,
Uncommon Knowledge
(New York: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 1995); “Loretta Young,”
Biography
, A&E, hosted by Peter Graves, first aired 24 February 1995. Loretta wrote an autobiography of sorts,
The Things I Had to Learn, As Told to Helen Ferguson
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), in which she says little about her career. Exactly what she had to learn, apart from having to “think” through a role, as Capra taught her, is never clear. The studio biographies in the Loretta Young Clippings File are mostly on target. Joan Wester Anderson’s “authorized biography,”
Forever Young: The Life, Loves and Enduring Faith of a Hollywood Legend
(Allen, TX: Thomas Moore, 2000) is cloyingly reverential. Anderson became Loretta’s biographer because Loretta was taken with her books on angels and wanted such an author to tell her story. Still, there is information in it that is not available elsewhere. Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein’s popular biography,
Loretta Young: An Extraordinary Life
(New York: Delacorte, 1986), is readable but lacks both notes and a bibliography, in addition to being incomplete.

4
“a large number of businesspersons”
: Craig Fuller, Associate Editor, Utah Historical Society, email to author, 15 April 2009.

5
“Universal released films”
: Bernard F. Dick,
City of Dreams: The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 40–41.

7
“‘one less mouth to feed’”
: Lewis, Uncommon Knowledge, 47.

7
“according to Loretta’s daughter”
: ibid

8
“she was going to be a movie star”
: “Loretta Young,”
Biography
, A&E, 1995.

8
“priests were frequent dinner guests”
:
“
Interview with Ricardo Montalban, Polly Ann Young, Sally Blane,” Jane Ardmore Papers, folder 14, Margaret Herrick Library, Special Collections.

9
“steel butterfly”
: James Robert Parish,
The Fox Girls
(Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1972), 202.

Chapter 2. The Creation of Loretta Young

10
“Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe”
: Donald Spoto,
Marilyn Monroe
(New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1993), 140.

10
“the most beautiful little girl I had ever seen”
: Colleen Moore,
Silent Star
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 162.

11
“I named her”
: ibid., 163.

11
“as her Paramount salary showed”
:
The Magnificent Flirt
, Paramount Collection, #101. Margaret Herrick Library, Special Collections.

12
“She was my first discovery”
: Mervyn LeRoy,
Take One
(New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974), 91

12
“he must have been very surprised”
: Lewis,
Uncommon Knowledge
, 52.

12
“For
Marry
Loretta received”
:
Broken Dishes
(
Too Young to Marry
) production file. 2722A, USC, Warner Bros. Archives.