Myrna Loy (20 page)

In
Penthouse
Loy was directed for the first time by W. S. (“Woody”) Van Dyke, a man who would sit at the controls for seven more of her films, including the best of the
Thin Man
pictures, and whose backing was key in boosting her to stardom. A former child actor and assistant to D. W. Griffith on
Intolerance
, Van Dyke was also an expert navigator, radio buff, and wireless telegraph aficionado. He had made his name directing outdoor adventure pictures such as
Trader Horn
and
Tarzan, the Ape Man
, as well as various westerns. Nicknamed “One Take Woody,” he was known for the speed and economy of his productions. Prizing spontaneity, he avoided rehearsals and repetitions, convinced that the first take was the best. Van Dyke didn’t allow his actors to think things over, and he was a master of the setup. He did his editing with the camera, not bothering to shoot “protection footage.” Pauline Kael referred to him as “the whirlwind.”
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Van Dyke said of his own shooting style: “The reckless pace at which I work has a little more behind it than mere desire to get through and save money. The heightened tension and lack of dreary rehearsals . . . gives a crisp, vital quality to the final production.” He never explained to actors how a scene should be played, and in this respect, according to Selznick, he was the opposite of the painstaking George Cukor. Related to his breakneck pace was a zany cowboy streak that could spur violent mayhem. “In his Western days, he shot up country hotels for fun. There were few to challenge his reputation as the toughest guy and the hardest drinker in Hollywood.” On the
Trader Horn
set he poured enough Scotch into a baboon to make the primate stagger.
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Myrna saw Van Dyke’s swift efficiency as a by-product of his ability to cut and edit film in his head. “He always knew his shots.” She also thought that his hard-charging directing mode emanated from an electrifying personality. He made you feel “good about things most of the time.” But inside, she thought, “he was probably a very sad man.” Renowned on and off the set for his vast drinking capacity, Van Dyke was one of those rare imbibers who managed to get drunk at night and still show up clean, shiny, and primed for work early the next morning. He expected no less of his drinking companions. Loy also connected his customary velocity and economy with his being a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves. His buzz-cut hair, lean build, and fondness for wearing boots proclaimed his quasi-military style.
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Van Dyke was exciting to work with but not exactly easygoing. Myrna complained that she felt worn out and needed a rest, not just from Van Dyke but from screen acting in general. “I’ve had too much to do,” she told a reporter. She’d appeared in fourteen films since signing with MGM, some of them on loan-out. She yearned for a vacation, but the roles kept coming, with no break in sight. The only time off she took during these first years on the MGM assembly line was a brief visit to Hawaii to see her dear friends Betty and Bob Black early in 1934. Even if her MGM contract had entitled her to relax now and then, Myrna herself feared that if she stopped working so hard, the career momentum she was building might be lost.
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Van Dyke took over as director of Myrna’s next film,
The Prizefighter and the Lady
, after Howard Hawks left the set. Hawks, who stayed on long enough to guide the novice actor Max Baer through his opening scenes, had expected that the leading man in this film would be Clark Gable, an experienced actor and a man he liked. Gable was originally supposed to be playing opposite Norma Shearer. By the time Hawks entered the picture, the casting gears had shifted again, and he was expecting to direct Gable and Jean Harlow. Hawks balked when the story refocused and heavyweight boxer Max Baer, a six-foot-four Goliath who’d pulled off nineteen knockouts in a row, replaced Gable. As far as Hawks was concerned, this was one casting change too many. Baer wasn’t even an actor, although American prizefighters had been jumping the ring’s ropes into show business for decades. Louis B. Mayer got on the case, precipitating Hawks’s exit. Hawks had managed to get behind schedule in his shooting, and that wouldn’t do. Hawks was out.
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Three months before
The Prizefighter and the Lady
began shooting, the Jewish Baer had defeated German heavyweight Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. The Nazis, who had claimed Schmeling as a symbol of Aryan superiority, interpreted his defeat by an American Jew as a worldwide humiliation. Germany would ban
The Prizefighter and the Lady
as a provocation to “national socialist feeling” that glorified Baer, “a Jewish Negroid type.”
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Baer’s character, Steve Morgan, is supposed to be vain and cocksure, traits he didn’t have to stretch too hard to conjure, but the actual Max Baer, according to Myrna, was “an unsophisticated baby at heart,” a man “as unprotected as a white rabbit.” Before they played any scenes together, the assistant director Earl Haley informed Myrna that Max was terrified to come near her. “He’d seen me on the screen and imagined I was too grand for words.” The script required Myrna’s character, Belle Mercer, a nightclub singer, to fall for the fighter and marry him after a single night out on the town with him. She gives up her singing career, dons an apron, and forgives her husband’s catting around—all for love.
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Myrna recalled the love scenes with Max Baer as “simply delicious. It was like the first kiss of a boy who had never kissed a girl before when he kissed me. He was positively reverent and so naïve.” Eventually, Max Baer, a natural actor who delivered a better performance than anyone had a right to expect, came to view Myrna as a kind of big sister to whom he confided his heartaches. Among those was his guilt about his boxing past; he’d inadvertently killed, by means of his knockout punch, one of his opponents in the ring. His $3,000 a week MGM salary, as well as his heavyweight championship, depended on his brutish strength, but he revealed to Myrna that he feared that very power might make him kill again. He also, most likely, confided some of the complexities of his love life. Myrna’s “unprotected white rabbit” prowled around quite a bit. Newly divorced, he was being sued for breach of promise by one cutie on his list of bedmates just as his most recent conquest, Jean Harlow, sidetracked him. Ads for the film promoted him as the new “It” man of the screen, but because MGM wasn’t willing to match the high salary he thought he was worth, Baer never made another picture there, though he acted for other companies.
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Practical jokes were the order of the day on the set of
The Prizefighter and the Lady
. Van Dyke handed Myrna an exploding cigarette. Jack Dempsey, who played himself as the referee in the big fight between Baer and the heavyweight champion Primo Carnera, wired Max Baer’s chair. During the fight scene Myrna released a toy mouse into the ring, causing Baer, who had a mouse phobia, to leap into Carnera’s arms.
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The climactic fight scene, a prelude to the real-life 1934 heavyweight championship bout in which Carnera would lose his title to Baer, was filmed on an MGM soundstage that replicated the ring in Madison Square Garden. Celebrities from the worlds of movies and prizefighting turned out to watch filming of the extended match, which ends in a draw. According to
Variety
, Carnera only agreed to the no-win situation after MGM added $10,000 to his original fee of $35,000.
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Although Baer snared all the publicity, MGM awarded Myrna Loy top billing on
The Prizefighter and the Lady
, an indication of her rising favor.
Variety
duly noted how she had “come along in her last few pictures.” Another sign was the professional company she kept. MGM included her in the all-star lineup for
Night Flight
, along with Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Lionel Barrymore, and Robert Montgomery. Cramming a great many stars into one movie became the vogue after the success of Thalberg’s 1932 production of
Grand Hotel
and Selznick’s
Dinner at Eight
. Although she is up there with big names, Myrna Loy practically disappears in
Night Flight
, which lists her character in the credits as “pilot’s wife.” She and Helen Hayes, another pilot’s wife who at least merits a name, spend their time waiting anxiously for the return of their flying ace husbands and living for news of them when they take to the skies. As
Variety’
s astute Cecelia Ager put it, “a flyer’s mighty fortunate to have Myrna Loy for a wife, the way she asks no questions, the way she accepts his arrivals and departures, . . . but above all the way she looks warm, gentle, yielding.” This wouldn’t be the last time Myrna Loy would find herself playing the little woman.
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When MGM cast her in
Men in White
opposite Clark Gable, its hottest ticket among leading men, giving them equal, above-the-title billing, the studio seemed to be telling the world that Myrna Loy had arrived.

Clark Gable’s handsome face and devil-may-care grin, his he-man build, palpable virility, and easy swagger had pushed him into the top ranks of stardom after several years of rejected screen tests. On presidential election night in November of 1932, Will Rogers commented after listening to the early returns, “Clark Gable is leading Hoover and Roosevelt both.” Hollywood had quickly pegged Gable as a muscular brute who proves he’s sexy by refusing to shave and slapping women around. He was the man, Thalberg said, “every woman wanted and every man wanted to be.” Offscreen, Gable’s interests ran to boozing, hunting, cars, motorcycles, and women. He never let the fact that he had a wife stand in the way of a steamy affair, or the promise of one. His overheated liaison with Joan Crawford, “the affair that nearly burned Hollywood down,” might have derailed both their careers if Crawford’s then-husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., had named Gable in their divorce. Gable, called on the carpet by Louis B. Mayer, knew he couldn’t pretend his affair with Crawford concerned them only. Mayer, he said, “would have ended my career in fifteen minutes. And I had no interest in becoming a waiter.”
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MGM kept a tight lid on the information fed to reporters, and Mayer, his operations chief Eddie Mannix, and Howard Strickling, head of publicity, constantly intervened and tried to manipulate the private lives of stars. The attitude was, MGM made you, and therefore MGM owns you. Backed by a morals clause in every actor’s contract that threatened termination if a player did anything that might “shock, insult or offend the community,” Mannix snooped, copying every single message, incoming and outgoing, in an actor’s box. Privacy didn’t exist, except on the fly in a bungalow or dressing room. The head of the story department, Sam Marx, recalled, “Phone calls to the players were screened, escorts provided, romances promoted or destroyed, and marriages arranged or rent asunder.”
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Although she had a reputation for being a cooperative team player, Myrna balked at any attempt by columnists or MGM publicists to shape or intrude on her personal life. Her outrage at the planted stories romantically linking her and Ramon Novarro marked her most strenuous protest to date at the studio. Posing for publicity photos was one thing, dispensing inside information about what she did off the set quite another.

Despite her hostility to prying eyes, an occasional reporter got wind of her relationship with Arthur, still legally married to Juliette Crosby, and hinted about it, as well as other possible liaisons, in gossip columns. A
Photoplay
photographer sneaked a picture of Myrna and Arthur at a party—they look most unhappy about being caught by the camera—and the published caption refers to them as companions. “At the moment,” ran a bit in the
New York Daily Mirror
, “Miss Loy has an actor, a producer and a prominent business man on three separate strings. And the producer attachment, which is of long standing, is liable to cause her a lot of embarrassment any minute.” But a Los Angeles newspaper columnist praised Myrna’s friendliness to the crew on the set, her sense of humor, and her well-scrubbed good looks, going on to say that Myrna had managed to stay out of the publicity limelight. She was called “the most voluptuous and least accessible beauty of the cinema world.”
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Myrna didn’t simply shut out intruders from the press who tried to scope out her private life; she also refused to spread stories about others. Her good breeding and tact didn’t allow her to acknowledge in her autobiography that MGM’s alabaster foundations were almost shattered, soon after she arrived at the studio in 1932, by the scandal created by producer-writer Paul Bern’s mysterious and bloody shooting death at the home he shared with his wife, Jean Harlow. Almost certainly a suicide, Bern’s death rocked Hollywood, dominating newspaper front pages for weeks.

Considering her reluctance to gossip, it matters that Myrna did tattle on Clark Gable in her autobiography. She and Gable had the same agent, Minna Wallis, with whom Gable was close. It was Minna who arranged for Loy and Gable to meet for the first time at the annual Mayfair Ball, a formal dinner dance at the Ambassador Hotel. Myrna greeted MGM’s most valuable male star by cracking, “My ears stick out too.” Big ears were a no-no for movie stars who played romantic roles. Whenever she was in a Selznick production, Selznick instructed the makeup crew to glue Myrna’s ears close to her head, which she hated, especially when the glue began to melt under the lights and had to be reapplied. MGM usually handled the ear problem simply by giving her a hairdo that covered the ears or by making sure she was shot from a flattering angle. Gable, who had no patience with fuss and artifice, balked at having his “flaps” pinned against his head with fish-skin tape. Now that he had clout at MGM, he could assert himself, insisting that the ears came with the rest of Clark Gable, but when he was trying to break into the movies, his ears almost stopped him cold. Before Gable ever appeared in a movie, Howard Hughes, after seeing him in a play, dismissed him. “He’ll never get any place, this guy,” he augured. “With those ears he looks like a taxi cab with both doors open.”
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