Hollywood Madonna (9 page)

Midnight Mary
(1933) was another loan out, this time to MGM, where Loretta had played her first major role in
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
. But she was primarily interested in a film about to go into production at Fox, the studio she would soon be joining. The film was
Berkeley Square
(1933), a time traveler with Leslie Howard re-creating his acclaimed stage role as an American transported to eighteenth-century London. Why Loretta was so obsessed with playing the female lead, which went to Heather Angel, is hard to fathom. Loretta was fond of reading plays, perhaps because she had become so used to screenplays, which, in format, are not that different. What is really puzzling is that she never expressed a desire to work in theater. “
She was never interested
in the stage, “ her daughter recalled. Still, she enjoyed reading Noël Coward and S.N. Behrman because their work epitomized the kind of sophistication to which she aspired. If she had been given the part in
Berkeley Square
, she would be playing another ingénue, but more significantly, one who was overshadowed by Howard, the only name that is even now associated with the film.

In
Midnight Mary
she was at least reunited with William Wellman and starring in a movie that would become a classic product of the heady time before the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934—when a mistress did not have to suffer the wages of sin, men and women
cohabited without benefit of marriage, murderers could be acquitted (with the right lawyer), a woman could boast of being a “party girl” without explaining her idea of a party, and morality went unmonitored by watchdogs and censorious moralists. With the inclusion of
Midnight Mary
in WarnerVideo’s
Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. Three
, a four-DVD set with Wellman’s
Heroes for Sale
and
Wild Boys of the Road, Midnight Mary
, long unavailable, offers proof of what a twenty-year-old natural actress can accomplish with a minimum of training and a maximum of talent.

Although Loretta still fretted about
Berkeley Square
, once
Midnight Mary
opened to flattering notices, she realized that, like everything else in her life, it was part of a divine plan. When filming began in April 1933, Loretta was faced with a challenge: Mary Martin was her most complex role to date. Mary was born in 1910; by the time of the main action she is twenty-three. Although Wellman says nothing about the film in his autobiography (which is not surprising, since
A Short Time for Insanity
is not a life in film, but a life that, coincidentally, involved film), he lavished a great deal of attention on Loretta, particularly on her eyes. She is first seen in a courtroom, where she is on trial for murder; totally disinterested in the proceedings, she thumbs through a copy of
Cosmopolitan
, holding it so close that it masks her face, except for her eyes, which seem larger than usual. In fact, her eyes resemble those of Joan Crawford who, reportedly, had been slated for the role. With fashionably plucked eyebrows and half moons penciled over her eyes, she looks like a woman of the world, although her world is in actuality the criminal underworld. Later, while waiting for the verdict, Mary sits in the county clerk’s office, where the dates on the court records books occasion an ingenious flashback sequence, with the camera panning left to right, as Mary’s past is reenacted. Orphaned at nine (Loretta plays a convincing nine-year-old with pigtails, scavenging in a dump), Mary is falsely accused of theft and sent to reform school. She emerges as a gangster’s moll in the making, awaiting only the right gangster, who materializes in the person of Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez), whose mistress she becomes.

Loretta reconciled the two extremes of her character: an essential decency and a cynicism spawned by an unfair legal system that only fed her passion for survival, even if it meant offering herself to Darcy. She knew his weakness for enigmatic women, who could shift back and forth between virgin and whore. Mary’s way of snaring a wealthy lover is to gaze at him with playfully seductive but dreamily innocent eyes (brightened by James Van Trees’s hagiographic lighting) to signal her availability—but only if she gets her way.

It was a daring performance, all the more because of Loretta’s Catholicism. But Loretta also understood Mary’s integrity. When a wealthy lawyer, Tom Mannering (Franchot Tone), befriends and then falls in love with her, becoming Darcy’s rival, Darcy plans to have him killed, but only succeeds in killing Mannering’s close friend (Andy Devine in an unusually sympathetic role). With Mary’s shooting of Darcy, the action then returns to the courtroom where a verdict is imminent.

Midnight Mary
could easily have been an indictment of capital punishment, which is where it seemed to be heading. Like one of Euripides’s plays,
Midnight Mary
required a deus ex machine: Mannering, who barges into the courtroom, claiming to have fresh evidence and demanding a retrial. Exactly what evidence Mannering has, apart from the fact that Mary committed murder to spare his life, is never revealed. But with a lawyer from an illustrious family defending her, Mary not only gets her acquittal but also Mannering. Their fade-out kiss must have convinced cockeyed optimists that “Happy Days Are Here Again” was not just Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign song, but a prediction of things to come.

Midnight Mary
was originally intended to be more socially conscious, but to what extent is hard to determine.
The first writer
to take a crack at it was veteran Anita Loos, who had a script ready in November 1932 entitled “Nora,” featuring a prologue in “socialist” Vienna, where the state takes care of tenement children like Nora (Mary’s original name). (Actually, Vienna was never socialist, although after World War I, socialists briefly dominated the Austrian National Assembly. Radicals were in their element, but their fervor was dampened when Engelbert Dollfuss became chancellor.) The prologue was not intended as a critique of capitalism, but as an example of a humane way of dealing with parentless children. In 1933, Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola took over; the title was still “Nora,” but it was minus the Vienna prologue, and opened, as the film does, with Nora on trial. Whoever was responsible for the change of title realized “Midnight Nora” has as much appeal as flat beer.
Midnight Mary
, apart from being alliterative, could raise eyebrows and revenues. It did both.

The film was a triumph not only for Loretta but also for the other Warner loan outs, William Wellman and James Van Trees, who photographed Loretta so strikingly in
Life Begins
,
They Call It Sin
,
Taxi!
, and
Heroes for Sale
(not to mention Barbara Stanwyck in
Baby Face
). Although Mary was Loretta’s most mature characterization to date, the film ultimately became Wellman’s. Wellman worked out the flashbacks so that when the camera panned the dates on the court records, left to right, the
action would return to the present by complementary horizontal wipes, proceeding from right to left—with the present emerging, as the past recedes. Usually, in a wipe, one is aware of a line moving horizontally, vertically, or diagonally across the screen, with one shot ending as the other begins. But here, it is as if the past exits to the left, as the present enters from the right. It is still a horizontal wipe, but done so artfully that it seems that past and present were once conjoined like Siamese twins and have now been separated. Although Loretta gave a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination, she did not get one. That year, the nominees were May Robson (
Lady for a Day
), Diana Wynyard (
Cavalcade
), and the eventual winner, Katharine Hepburn (
Morning Glory
).

Twenty-year-old actresses were rarely given such fulfilling roles as Trina and Mary. During the studio years, even the icons were stuck with parts they knew were beneath them, but which they were contractually obliged to accept. Warner’s was perhaps the least sensitive to the entitlements of stardom, dismissing the idea that if one good turn deserves another, so should one good film lead to another. Bette Davis, for one, languished in a limbo of unmemorable films in the early 1930s, until out of desperation she moved over to RKO to give an indelible performance as the self-destructive waitress in
Of Human Bondage
(1934). Warner’s punished Davis by ignoring her when Oscar nomination time came around. It was only a groundswell of support that resulted in her name being placed on the ballot. Many thought Davis would win, but dark horses have been known to reach the finish line before the odds-on favorite, and Claudette Colbert won that year for
It Happened One Night
. Davis had to fight for better roles, even though the Academy gave her a consolation prize for her performance in the potboiler,
Dangerous
, the following year. Then more of the same, until other leading roles resulted, but she never experienced one artistic triumph after another. Garbo fared better, but she was at MGM, where she was revered, with her films sufficiently spaced so that audiences were not given a surfeit of Garbo. Davis, by comparison, was at the Warner factory, where the merchandise varied from
Jezebel
(1938), for which Davis received a second Oscar, to the disastrous
Beyond the Forest
(1949), a transmogrification of Davis’s art that reduced her to a gargoyle. Freelancing was the solution, as it later became for Loretta.

CHAPTER 6
Last Days at Warner’s

After
Platinum Blonde
,
Man’s Castle
, and
Midnight Mary
, which together required her to play three different types of women at two other studios, Loretta felt more secure about her art. The reviews bolstered her confidence, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she would be moving on. But where?

In November 1932, Jesse Lasky announced his intention to become an independent producer at the Fox Film Corporation, with
Zoo in Budapest
and
Berkeley Square
as his first productions. Loretta was well aware of Famous Players-Lasky, the studio resulting from the Famous Players-Lasky Feature Plays merger in 1916, with Adolph Zukor as president, and Lasky as vice president for production. It was there that Loretta’s film career was launched in 1917. The company underwent various name changes, the most significant being the addition of “Paramount” in 1927. Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky was not the corporate name for long. Zukor was obsessed with creating a vertically integrated empire, with its own theatre chain, Publix. To prevent friction between the studio and its theater circuit, Lasky stepped aside.
The new name was
Paramount-Publix, eventually becoming just plain Paramount.

Lasky wanted Loretta for his first independent film,
Zoo in Budapest
(1933), with Gene Raymond as her costar. Raymond gave a bravura performance as Zanni, an animal trainer orphaned at an early age and raised by the director of the Budapest Zoo, where he grew into a combination of noble savage and animal activist, stealing fur stoles and burning them. Loretta also played an orphan, Eve, who is not as fortunate as Zanni. Eve lives in an orphanage, where a holiday is a trip to the zoo, and a chaperone or “keeper” is dependent on a guidebook to describe the attractions. Zanni locks eyes with Eve, beckoning to her to come with him. Another
orphan, eager to cooperate, diverts the group’s attention by diving into a lake, making it possible for Eve to escape and join Zanni’s world, where humans bond with animals.

For those who only know Raymond as Jeanette MacDonald’s husband, his Zanni is a revelation. It is a strikingly athletic performance, requiring Raymond to jump over partitions, and in the terrifying climax, to hop on the back of an elephant with a young boy he has rescued. He must then grab on to a rope to hoist the boy and himself to safety—but not before a tiger leaps up and takes a piece out of Zanni’s leg. Regardless, Zanni survives, his gait no less springy, and both he and Eve are rewarded by the boy’s father, who makes it possible for Eve to leave the orphanage, marry Zani, and live in a cottage on his estate. In the last scene—which is more like the finale of an operetta—the couple arrives at their new home, radiantly happy and unperturbed about the future.

Loretta had relatively little to do in the film. The real stars were Raymond and director Rowland V. Lee, who kept a fragile script from splintering. Raymond fancied himself the successor to Douglas Fairbanks; however, it was Errol Flynn and then Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who buckled the swash and wielded a mean rapier. Still, Raymond’s performance was admirable. He did not need a double; like Burt Lancaster, he did his own climbing and swinging, in addition to exuding the kind of machismo that won over audiences. Raymond was probably one of the leading men Loretta developed a crush on, not knowing at the time that he was bisexual, more homosexually than heterosexually inclined. In fact, when he married Jeanette MacDonald in 1937, she was still in love with Nelson Eddy, her first and only love. Raymond’s lover at the time was Mary Pickford’s husband, Buddy Rogers. On their honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, Jeanette and Raymond had a cabin next to Rogers and Pickford, then an incurable alcoholic: “
There was a honeymoon
going on—but the ones sleeping together were Gene Raymond and Buddy Rogers.” But at the time
Zoo in Budapest
was filmed, Raymond had not met MacDonald, and only a few kindred spirits knew his sexual preferences. As for Loretta, the crush ended when the shoot was over, and then it was on to another leading man and another crush.

Except for
Heroes for Sale
, her last films for Warner’s were as unmemorable as the first, requiring only that she have the stamina of a gymnast. For
The Hatchet Man
, she had to sit patiently in the makeup chair while she was turned into a mannequin and her face into a mask. Her best work was in the loan outs, which are now recognized as outstanding examples of pre-code filmmaking.