Myrna Loy (21 page)

At Warner Bros., where Gable worked before Thalberg snagged him for MGM, both Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner had decided the ears made Gable look like an ape and sent him packing. Myrna’s remark about their shared ear problem was her way of trying to establish buddy-ship, nothing more.

At the Ambassador, Myrna and Clark danced together to “Dancing in the Dark,” an experience she remembered as “divine.” After the ball they were driven to their respective homes in the same chauffeured car. According to her account in
Being and Becoming
, Myrna, Gable, and his socially prominent wife, Ria, several years older than he and somewhat matronly in appearance, shared the backseat. They’d all had plenty to drink, but Myrna was clearheaded enough to become unnerved when Gable started sidling up close to her. He got out of the car to accompany her to her door and as she fiddled with her keys, grabbed her and planted a love bite on her neck. She responded with a shove, and he fell back a few porch steps into the hedge (
BB
, 84).

Myrna once said of Gable, “He believed his own publicity, that he was irresistible.” She must be the only woman who ever wrote for publication about spurning him, though there were a handful of movie colony women—Mrs. Basil Rathbone was one—who privately said they considered him coarse and “not my type.” Most of the countless women he approached, and millions more who only worshipped from afar, got weak-kneed in his presence. Joan Crawford confessed that in a scene in
Possessed
where Gable had to grab her roughly, “his nearness had such an impact [that] if he hadn’t held me by both shoulders, I’d have dropped.” Joan Blondell reported that she and Barbara Stanwyck both had to sit down to steady themselves the first day he showed up on the set of
Night Nurse
. That was the kind of response that Gable expected.
Photoplay
called him “a caveman with a club in one hand and a book of poetry in the other.” He kept the poetry part under wraps, fearing it would tarnish his superman image.
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Gable could be moody. During the shooting of
Men in White
he repaid Myrna’s rebuff by ignoring her as much as he could, walking past her to offer coffee and cakes to the English actress Elizabeth Allan, who played a student nurse in the picture and with whom he was smitten. Not until their next film together would Gable and Loy develop a warm, relaxed camaraderie.

Based on a Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Sidney Kingsley that was still on the boards in New York when the film opened in Chicago,
Men in White
ran into trouble with the Hays Office even before shooting began. The problem was that an abortion figures prominently in the story about a young Dr. Ferguson (clean-shaven Gable), who, although engaged to Myrna Loy’s character, Laura Hudson, has an affair with the student nurse played by Elizabeth Allan and gets her pregnant. The nurse attempts an abortion and develops peritonitis. The young doctor operates on her, trying to save her life, but she dies as the intern adjusts her bed to ease her pain. Gable showed a new side here, disclosing what
Variety
called “a tenderness wholly foreign to the rough stuff he has been doing.”
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After reading a synopsis of the plot, James Wingate of the Hays Office wrote to Eddie Mannix that the story “presents grave danger from the standpoint of the Code and censorship.” Cuts were ordered to make the cause of the young woman’s death more ambiguous. References to peritonitis were deleted, as if that solved the problem. But the implied illicit intimacy between nurse and doctor, and the resulting pregnancy, stayed in, and not surprisingly after the Legion of Decency came into being in 1934, it declared the film unfit for public exhibition.
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Myrna’s role was an unsympathetic one for most of the film. Her rich, socially ambitious, Laura Hudson resents her fiancé’s demanding profession because it interferes with their social life. She wants him to abandon his plan to study with the idealistic Dr. Hochberg (Jean Hersholt) and leave his job at a metropolitan hospital for a posh private practice on Park Avenue. After touring the hospital, fainting during a witnessed operation, and holding the hand of the dying nurse, she’s allowed to show a new empathy that leaves room for a possible reconciliation with Gable’s character. She has learned—and we in the audience are meant to applaud her for it—that a woman must put her future husband’s career first.

The release of
Men in White
had to be delayed in New York and Los Angeles because the producers of the play didn’t want to have to compete with the movie version in cities where the live play remained on the boards. As a result, the film had a longer than usual run and was still playing in movie theaters in the spring of 1934, when the surprise Frank Capra hit
It Happened One Night
was also making the rounds. Gable’s performance as Peter Warne, the waggish reporter who romances a runaway heiress played by Claudette Colbert, added to his already considerable luster. He and Colbert would both be honored with Academy Awards. When he removed his shirt in a tourist cabin he shared with Colbert, revealing some bare flesh and a pair of brawny shoulders, the swoons could be heard round the world, and undershirt sales plummeted.
Men in White
benefited at the box office from an epidemic of Gable fever.

Clark Gable, who’d made
It Happened One Night
on loan to Columbia Pictures, would be back at MGM opposite Myrna Loy in her next film. Myrna had blown it when she turned down the role of heiress Ellie Andrews in
It Happened One Night
because the script—not yet revised in the version she saw—seemed weak but also because she was working so hard she couldn’t see straight. What advice Minna Wallis provided when Myrna was considering the script that got away isn’t known. Myrna became very defensive about what proved to be a serious error in judgment, never acknowledging that it was one. But she knew she didn’t want to blow it again. In her upcoming film she would once again appear opposite Clark Gable. This time she would also be working with someone she hadn’t met yet, a dapper actor new to MGM by the name of William Powell.

CHAPTER 8

Mr. and Mrs. Thin Man

“Myrna Loy and William Powell are the ham and eggs, the peaches and cream, the salt and pepper of the movies,” an MGM scribe commented as their fourth of six
Thin Man
films was being released. “They go together naturally as night and day.” The screen marriage of this matched pair of lithe bodies and insouciant spirits outlasted any of Myrna’s offscreen couplings and for their fans has never lost its luster. Powell and Loy made fourteen films together between 1934 (the year they first worked together, in
Manhattan Melodrama
, and also the year of
The Thin Man
) and 1947. Their connubial bliss seemed so perfect that fans found it hard to believe that in real life they were never married to one another. During their heyday Loy regularly received fan mail seeking marital advice because of the obvious happiness of her union with Powell. When the couple came to San Francisco to make
After the Thin Man
in the mid-1930s, the St. Francis Hotel management, unaware that Jean Harlow, also in San Francisco, was Powell’s main squeeze at the time, booked Loy and Powell into its honeymoon suite. Receptionists at the hotel, no doubt wearing red faces, promptly corrected the gaffe. Since proprieties had to be observed and scandal avoided, Loy and Harlow ended up rooming together in the luxe quarters, while Powell growled about being consigned to a room the size of a large closet (
BB
, 142).
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Powell and Loy’s breezy teamwork as Nick and Nora Charles in
The Thin Man
seemed pitch-perfect. Dressed to the nines and armed with quips that amuse but don’t inflict wounds, they live in the moment. They savor each teasing barb as they relish one another, always poised for the next clue-chasing adventure in detecting or martini-lubricated good time at some chic nightspot.

Their constant drinking onscreen, which never produces seriously slurred speech or any other aftereffects more repellent than a severe headache, raised a few hackles in 1934. The Production Code’s chief censor, Joseph Breen, wrote to MGM’s Louis B. Mayer to advise that “drinking at the bar should be held down to that necessary for character and plot.” After the film’s release, a few letters to Breen and to fan magazines expressed horror at the amount of alcohol the characters in
The Thin Man
consume. Hollywood’s strict enforcement of the Production Code was just about to begin, but the edict mandating a Production Code Administration seal of approval before a movie could be distributed, and instituting stiff fines for erring producers, was still a few months in the future when the film premiered.
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The Legion of Decency had already shaken up the entire American film industry with its well-organized and financially damaging film boycott, and everyone in the business knew a more serious crackdown was just around the corner. Producers were trying to stave off government censorship by orchestrating their own in-house cleanups.

Anticipating the tough rules on morals that would soon be rigidly enforced, the designers of
The Thin Man
put married Nick and Nora into twin beds with a veritable canyon between them. Nick and Nora are a sexy pair, constantly finding excuses to touch, falling into one another’s arms once in a while, and lolling around in silk, satin, and mink in the parlor on Christmas morning. When he’s about to face danger in his warehouse search for the missing inventor Clyde Wynant, Nora’s voice quivers when she tells Nick to take care of himself. “I do believe the little woman cares,” says Nick before they kiss and clinch. At the very end of the movie they seem to be about to make love in the bottom bunk bed on the train taking them back to California (Asta, the dog, coyly covers his eyes with his paw to avoid watching). Most often, though, Nick and Nora show their affection via mutual ribbing. “Nicky, I love you because you know such
lovely
people,” says Nora as one thug after another joins their party. When Nora asks him if he goes for a particular type of girl, Nicks answers, “Only you, darling—lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.”

Nick and Nora rarely speak a straight line, so much do they love verbal and physical pokes in the ribs. But in the privacy of their hotel bedroom they never seem to have sex; they just dodge bullets, converse, recover from hangovers, and now and then try to catch forty winks. Mostly, Nick drinks.

About the nonstop alcohol consumption in
The Thin Man
, and its potentially dire influence on public morality, a concerned woman, possibly a theater manager, wrote to the Production Code Administration’s Joseph Breen to observe, “It seems to me what has been taken out in vulgarity has been put back in drinking.” By the time
After the Thin Man
began production in 1936, even stricter censorship was in place, and Breen balked again at the “excessive amount of drinking.” He itemized eight scenes on eight different script pages in which “liquor is exhibited or consumed, or characters are shown under the influence.” In an attempt to comply, MGM toned down some of the drinking, but one hardly notices.
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Breen and his fellow bluenoses lost the first round.
The Thin Man
, like Dashiell Hammett’s best-selling novel, came right out of the Prohibition mind-set. Published immediately after the 1933 repeal of Prohibition, the novel is a shrine to the martini that does double duty as a primer on cures for the hangover. The movie picks up that cue. According to the screenwriter and biographer Gavin Lambert, the film’s director, W. S. Van Dyke, came to work with a flask of gin in his pocket, from which he regularly sipped and which would be refilled a few times during the day.
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Our introduction to Nick and Nora comes about eleven minutes into the film, in a posh Manhattan hotel bar. Nora’s entrance required her, elegantly turned out in a jaunty black hat and Dolly Tree–designed fur-collared suit, and laden with just-purchased Christmas packages, to charge in on Christmas Eve, calling “Asta” to the eager white wire-haired terrier who’s yanking her on a leash as he sprints toward his goal: Nick. At the bar Nick has been demonstrating the proper way to shake a martini (“always shake to waltz time”). Dragged along by Asta, Nora tumbles to the floor, falling flat on her face in a perfect three-point landing, and then slides several feet as the packages go flying. Helped to her feet by two gallant men who rush to her aid, the unflappable Nora stands upright and approaches Nick without missing a beat. Her makeup still intact, she looks perfectly put together when Nick greets her with the words, “Hello, Sugar.” Van Dyke shot this sequence unrehearsed and in one take, with the camera on the floor. To prepare Myrna, he’d merely asked her if she knew how to fall by tripping herself. Sure of her poise and trained dancer’s grace, she allowed as how she could, even if she’d never done slapstick. She hit her mark with her chin on the first try (
BB
, 89).

A few minutes later Nora, who will wear an icepack on her head the next day, orders “five more,” so she can match Nick in number of martinis consumed. “Line ’em up,” she tells the barman, playfully indicating to Nick that she’s not going to let him show her up. There’s an element of cheerful rivalry between them.

The Thin Man
has a witty script by the married screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich that allows Nick and Nora to spar and sparkle, introducing a buoyant romantic comedy dimension that the Hammett novel doesn’t have. On the printed page Hammett’s fictional hard-boiled sleuth and his heiress wife are plenty smart-mouthed, hard-drinking, fast-living, and with it, but they occupy rooms more dimly lit—more noirish—than their screen incarnations. In the novel they don’t dress as stylishly, host as many parties, or go in for as much horseplay as MGM’s Nick and Nora, though in the movie they’re equally devoted and prone to the same affectionately sarcastic mutual needling, some of it directly quoted dialogue from the book. The movie script, though it closely follows the original, adds laugh lines (such as Nick’s “he didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids”) and gives Asta the dog (who’s not a terrier but a schnauzer in the book) more prominence. The movie tones down, but doesn’t eliminate, the vicious sadism of the villainous Mimi (Minna Gombell), ex-wife of the missing Clyde Wynant; in the book she’s prone to beating both of her adult children black and blue. And the Hammett novel lent Nick Charles an ethnic identity that got lost in Hollywood. The original Nick is a Greek-American whose real surname, Charalam-bides, had been whittled down by an Ellis Island immigration agent.
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