Myrna Loy (18 page)

Although she was later supportive of Myrna, at the time that Jeanette MacDonald worked with her in
Love Me Tonight
, competition prevailed. When Myrna appeared in a pink frock for the formal hunt ball scene, MacDonald demanded for herself, and was given, the dress Myrna wore. Even though this film was shot in black and white, colors still mattered to actors and to photographers. Myrna substituted a black velvet low-backed gown that contrasted elegantly with her white powdered wig and with the pale pastel shades adorning all the other ladies at the ball. Countess Valentine steals the scene.

Maurice Chevalier, the film’s other big star, simply ignored Myrna. Although she sometimes rode with him in his car to shooting locations in the San Fernando Valley, he kept to himself, saving the fabled smiles and exuberant Gallic charm for his moments in front of the camera. “His gaiety is put on and taken off with his makeup,” observed Jack Grant in
Photoplay
.
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Censors, who made plenty of cuts even in pre-Code Hollywood, eliminated a few of Countess Valentine’s risqué lines. She would not be allowed to offer Maurice a private moonlit showing of the “virgin spring.” Myrna sang a chorus of “Mimi” in the film, her sole venture doing her own singing onscreen, but before the film was reissued to American theaters in 1949, a time when the Code was being enforced, the scene was cut because of the revealing silk nightgown she wore in it. In European prints it stayed in.
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Even though
Love Me Tonight
, which cost almost $1 million to produce, failed to make money in the United States, Myrna loved working on the picture and felt extremely happy during production. She formed a lasting friendship with Richard Rodgers, who enjoyed teasing her about her relationship with Arthur (and who would soon write a song for another Loy picture,
Manhattan Melodrama
). She knew that it would be hard to top the talent of
Love Me Tonight’s
cast and crew, and she was aware that she had contributed something buoyant, spicy, and delicious to the picture. Her performance shimmers. Mordaunt Hall in the
New York Times
found her “easy and graceful” as Countess Valentine.
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Her next two roles reprised the bad old days of lurid ethnic stereotyping, but Myrna threw herself into them with over-the-top abandon. Aided by exaggerated makeup in RKO’s
Thirteen Women
, as the hypnotic, half-Javanese and half-Indian Ursula Georgi, she terrorizes a group of white former schoolmates who once banished her from a sorority, predicting their doom in a series of mailed horoscopes. One piercing stare of her basilisk eyes is enough to torpedo a life. Only Irene Dunne’s character, Laura Stanhope, fights back, enlisting the aid of a police detective, played by Ricardo Cortez, to protect her young son from Ursula’s murderous talons. The film was put together so hastily and haphazardly that only ten women, not thirteen, figure in the plot. Characters that were to have been played by Betty Furness and Phyllis Fraser were dropped, and Myrna herself was a replacement for the originally cast Zita Johann. Two days after the film’s opening, one of the actresses in it, British-born Peg Entwistle, captured headlines when she committed suicide by leaping from the enormous “Hollywoodland” sign on Mt. Lee. To the cast of
Thirteen Women
it must have seemed as if Ursula Georgi’s power to kill with a hypnotic stare extended into real life. The film came and went so quickly that—aside from the tabloid attention to Entwistle’s suicide—it barely made a blip on the consciousness of the moviegoing public. Nevertheless, as an example of campy, unintended hilarity, it is great fun to watch.

Back at MGM Myrna appeared in her first Metro picture since her conversation with Thalberg. As the sadistic and sensual dragon lady daughter of Dr. Fu Manchu in
The Mask of Fu Manchu
, she played her last exotic temptress with a flourish, reprising the broad, scenery-chewing acting style she’d honed during her years in silent pictures. The director, Charles Brabin, was a veteran of silent films who had directed the celebrated vamp Theda Bara in her last two movies and become her husband. He knew a thing or two about sinuous, dark-haired screen vixens equipped with fatal gazes.

Although the setting was mostly Hollywood’s version of China, the narrative begins in England, and in
The Mask of Fu Manchu
Myrna was surrounded by Brits: Brabin, Loy’s coplayer Lawrence Grant, and the film’s star, Boris Karloff, were all British born, and the plot involved archaeologists from the British Museum. Karloff, fresh from his triumph in
Frankenstein
, was borrowed from Universal to portray the nefarious Harvard-educated Chinese scientist bent on the destruction of the white race, a fictional creation of the novelist Sax Rohmer.

MGM seems to have started this production without a clear sense of where it wanted the film to go. According to Karloff, in the original script, which was incomplete on the first day of shooting, his character sometimes spoke flawless Oxford English and sometimes pidgin. Three days into production, the original director, Charles Vidor, was replaced by Brabin, and the screenwriter, Courteney Terrett, yielded to a team of writers that at one time included five names and eventually reduced itself to just three. Boris Karloff decided that the only way to approach his maniacal role would be to kid it, and Myrna followed his lead.
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The absurd plot pits two sets of explorers competing against each other in the Gobi Desert as they search for the sword, mask, and tomb of Genghis Khan. The group from the British Museum has virtue and the British Empire on its side. Pitted against them, Fu Manchu and his henchmen exult in evil, seeking nothing less than world domination, “to kill the white man and take his women.” Each side enlists the support of a young, alluring woman. On the English side is Sheila Barton (Karen Morley), a blonde, always dressed in white, who dons a pith helmet and insists on joining the Gobi expedition after her archaeologist father has been kidnapped and tortured by Dr. Fu Manchu. Sheila’s opposite number, played by Myrna Loy, is Fu Manchu’s dark-haired, sexually ravenous daughter, Fah Lo See. She keeps a pet python and wears elaborate tall headdresses (one of which looks a lot like a fringed art deco lampshade) and floor-length, high-collared embroidered gowns designed by Adrian. Appropriately, her face, lit from below, is often cast in shadows. Sheila’s boyfriend, Terrence Granville (Charles Starrett), for the moment serves as Fah Lo See’s preferred object of lust. After his capture by Fu Manchu, Fah Lo See orders him to be stripped and whipped. She looks ecstatic as she urges those doing the whipping to go “Faster! Faster!” At least she didn’t have to do the whipping herself, as had been proposed in an earlier draft of the script. Terrence is manacled, laid out on a divan, and injected with a serum distilled from a mixture of Fu Manchu’s blood, dragon blood, and reptile organs that will render him passive; he will do as he is commanded.

MGM went all out on lurid effects, introducing a pit of snapping crocodiles, a bell torture, electrical shocks, and walls of metal spikes to the indignities his enemies face at Fu Manchu’s headquarters. A reporter for the
Los Angeles Record
noted that “the picture is so packed with underground passages, electrical death machines, snakes, tarantulas, . . . hypnotizing serums, daggers in the back, trap doors, screams, smoking fluids, mummies coming to life, and all the other gasp accessories that the audience was unable to do anything but laugh.”
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In her next movie Myrna again, as she had in
The Devil to Pay
and
Rebound
, spoke literate lines that originated in the theater. She considered her work as Cecelia in
The Animal Kingdom
another landmark in her career, a “final break with the exotics” and her first straight dramatic part “of sufficient importance to really attract attention.” Based on a sophisticated Philip Barry play that in its Broadway run starred and was coproduced by Leslie Howard, the movie adaptation, made when Myrna was again loaned to RKO, was chosen to launch the new thirty-seven-hundred-seat RKO Roxy Theater in New York. That, along with its appeal to worldly, upper-crust moviegoers, qualified it as a prestige picture. But Myrna might easily have missed out on the experience, and the wide exposure, because it seems that David O. Selznick, head of production at RKO and bent on making quality “adult” pictures that scored with a select few rather than grade-B programmers pitched to the masses, appreciated her beauty but wasn’t yet much impressed by her acting. Even though Loy had been considered for the role of Cecelia on Broadway, refusing it only because MGM wouldn’t grant her time away from Culver City, Selznick opposed casting her; he favored Karen Morley, another actress borrowed from MGM, for the role of Cecelia.
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Selznick may have been aware that his new protégée at RKO, Katharine Hepburn, had designs on
The Animal Kingdom
. Hepburn learned the part of Daisy Sage, an artist who is Cecelia’s free-spirited rival, for the Broadway production, from which Leslie Howard, in his capacity as coproducer, fired her while it was still in rehearsal. Not one to let go without a fight, Katharine Hepburn even used a scene from
The Animal Kingdom
in her first movie screen test, her debut on celluloid.
⁹

Leslie Howard had wanted Hepburn fired from the Broadway production because she towered over him and he couldn’t bear her mannerisms or “insufferable bossiness.” Now, in the movie version of
The Animal Kingdom
, Myrna Loy would be cast as Leslie Howard’s wife. Maybe Hepburn, still smarting from Howard’s rebuff, resented Myrna’s ability to get and keep a role opposite Leslie Howard. Hepburn issued a left-handed compliment, saying that Myrna got the Cecelia role “because she’s beautiful”—as if her looks were all she had going for her (
BB
, 76).
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Selznick and his extremely bright and socially influential wife, Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, were longtime friends of Arthur Hornblow Jr. The Selznicks and the Hornblows, during the time when Arthur was still living with his then-wife Juliette Crosby, were close enough friends that when newborn Terry Hornblow left the hospital in his mother’s arms in January 1931, Irene Selznick drove the baby and Juliette home. Irene, who described Arthur as “crisp and debonair” and “a man of taste in wine, women, and letters” who was “the ultimate cosmopolite,” never even mentions Myrna Loy in her memoir. If she ever had an interest in Myrna, it was only as an appendage to Arthur.
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Myrna had an advocate, though a far less influential one than David O. Selznick, in the RKO director Ned Griffith, who had directed her in
Rebound
and who had scored a hit with another film based on a Philip Barry play, the 1930 version of
Holiday
. Griffith prized Myrna’s talent and potential, and he wanted her to play Cecelia in
The Animal Kingdom
. Dubious, Selznick wouldn’t even agree to allow Myrna to test for the role. Her screen test opposite Leslie Howard had to be conducted on the sly, at night (
BB
, 76). Although Leslie Howard, a persnickety vegetarian, could smell garlic sausage on Myrna’s breath, the test went very well. Selznick liked it and agreed to give Myrna the part.

The Animal Kingdom
is an example of the adult fare Selznick wanted at RKO. Its premise was so daring that attempts to reissue the film in 1935 and 1937 were denied by the Production Code Administration. The script questioned the sanctity of marriage, suggesting that a union of true soul mates—the characters played by Leslie Howard and Ann Harding—trumps any other kind of marriage and can thrive without legal or religious sanction. Harding’s Daisy Sage, the artist and ex-mistress, speaks the naughty line, “I’m a foolish virgin—well, foolish anyway.” It’s clear that Daisy and her best friend, Tom Collier, the prominent New York book publisher played by Leslie Howard, have been longtime lovers. When bohemian Daisy goes off to Paris on assignment, debonair Tom becomes engaged to Myrna’s Cecelia Henry, a gilt-edged knockout whose beauty masks the reality that she’s a far less interesting and more conventional, manipulative, and mercenary woman than independent-minded Daisy. Tom’s moneybags father wants him to settle down and encourages him to marry Cecelia. When Daisy returns and Tom tells her of his engagement to Cecelia, he tries to persuade Daisy that they must continue their friendship, but, heartbroken, Daisy turns him away. Now married to Cecelia, and living an isolated and comfortable suburban life in Connecticut, Tom submits to the tarnished values of his wealth-obsessed father and wife. He compromises his integrity by becoming a publisher of the kind of lucrative pulp fiction he used to scorn. Cecelia has encouraged this lowering of his literary standards, and she generally disdains Tom’s previous life.

When Daisy finally meets Cecelia at a birthday party for Tom, she tells Tom that she feels pity for him. She has caught Cecelia embracing Tom’s lawyer, and she has read one of the trashy novels Tom is publishing, pronouncing it tripe. In the past Tom has found Cecelia sexually irresistible. Myrna plays her as bitchy but very alluring in the frothy negligee she wears in the bedroom scene. But after she locks Tom out of their bedroom because he won’t agree to move into town and live with his rich father, he finally sees Cecelia as the greedy schemer she is. He leaves her, telling his butler that he’s “going back to my wife.” Tom’s true wife, according to Philip Barry, is Daisy, the woman he can talk to, not the one who wears the wedding ring.

Plenty of behind-the-scenes drama accompanied the production of
The Animal Kingdom
. Myrna quickly fell under Leslie Howard’s spell, as he did under hers. The sensitive, responsive, and easy-to-get-along-with Myrna appealed to him far more than had the commanding, angular, and contentious Katharine Hepburn. As for Myrna’s reaction to Howard, she found his combination of passion and fine British manners hard to resist. “We grew very fond of one another on that picture,” Myrna remembered. “I mean, it could have been a real scrambola—if I’d allowed it to be.” Leslie Howard appeared to be upper crust, but that wasn’t his background. Born Leslie Steiner to middle-class Jewish parents in London, the popular actor began his stage career after experiencing shell shock in World War I. He had a loyal wife and two children but proved very susceptible to his leading ladies. He’d apparently had a fling with Marion Davies and later would have an affair with Merle Oberon. Known for his restraint as an actor, in the flesh he proved impetuous. While Arthur was away in New York, he came to Myrna’s rented house, pressing her to run away with him. She was tempted but managed to hold back (
BB
, 77).
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