Myrna Loy (28 page)

It turns out that though there really was a Hecht-MacArthur film in the works called
Soak the Rich
that would be released in 1936, no one ever believed that she would appear in it. “Some executives at Metro profess to see in the Hecht-MacArthur action one of the pranks for which the pair are noted,” observed the
New York Times
. The announcement of the pending deal was a ploy, a maneuver concocted by the pranksters Hecht and MacArthur out of a desire to stick it to Louis B. Mayer while simultaneously aiding Myrna Loy’s cause. Hecht and MacArthur disliked Mayer and had no qualms about taking him on. The prospect filled them with glee.
³⁴

The ploy worked. In no time the headline “Actress Mends Studio Quarrel” ran in the
New York American
and other newspapers. Although terms of the settlement with MGM were kept under wraps at first, all who were following the story heard that Myrna Loy had flown back to Los Angeles, patched things up with Mayer, and would soon be back at work. In a face-saving (and contract-protecting) gesture, Mayer maintained that Myrna Loy would still be getting the same pay that she was receiving before she went on strike. In other words, it appeared that she had not violated or changed her existing contract. The front page of the
LA Times
screamed, “Myrna Loy Back on Lot at Old Pay.” What wasn’t made public was that she was paid a bonus lump sum of $25,000, the equivalent of about $400,000 in 2009, and that when her contract came up for renewal in 1937, she would be given a significant raise to $4,000 a week.
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Was the one-woman strike worth the risk? By almost any measure, it was. It resulted in a professional victory for Myrna Loy and allowed her to take a breather and visit New York and Europe for the first time. It yielded a sorely needed sense of renewal.

CHAPTER 10

Mrs. Arthur Hornblow Jr.

“The Arthur Hornblows represent one of the happiest, most devoted couples in Hollywood,” readers of the fan magazine
Motion Picture
learned in the fall of 1936, a few months after Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow Jr. tied the knot. And that “happiest, most devoted” label was just for starters. The picture-book newlyweds—a busy Paramount producer clad in Savile Row suits, and his charming movie star wife—were building a dream house. “While awaiting completion of the grand new house,” the article continued, “they are spending their honeymoon at Palos Verdes, the swank colony at the shore.”
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After years of nail-biting over Arthur’s “I love you, but” attitude, Myrna’s quest for commitment at last reached consummation. The wedding happened a year after their trip to Europe, on June 27, 1936, the very day that FDR delivered his “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech when accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention for his second term. Not giving too much thought to FDR’s presidency at the moment, Arthur and Myrna wed hurriedly in Ensenada, in Baja Mexico, described in another of the passel of fan magazines attempting to track Myrna Loy’s every move as a “sleepy, quaint” sun-and-sand-soaked town about seventy miles south of the border. The bride “wore a high-neck dress that buttoned up the back, beige crepe with hand-blocked flowers,” and a brown taffeta hat, detail-hungry fans were told. A Mexican judge officiated, and the bride and groom were attended by two friends they’d brought with them from Los Angeles to serve as maid of honor and best man: Shirley Hughes and Ray Ramsey. Shirley, Myrna’s stand-in at MGM, by now had become her close friend. Myrna and Arthur both liked Shirley’s fiancé, the MGM cameraman Ray Ramsey. Neither Della nor Myrna’s brother, David, had been asked to join the party. Myrna tended to keep the different spheres of her life quite separate, and any event involving Arthur usually excluded Myrna’s family.
²

Douglas Fairbanks Sr. hired a “cloud clipper” to fly down for the nuptial dinner at an Ensenada inn. Fairbanks was an old friend of the Hornblow clan, dating from the time when Arthur Hornblow Sr. edited
Theatre
magazine in New York. Fairbanks had been the subject of an interview Arthur Jr. published in New York right out of law school and long before he moved to California. Arthur’s father, who wrote a monthly column called “Going to the Play,” had known him back in the 1910s, when Fairbanks trod the boards as a Broadway actor. Fairbanks and Lady Sylvia Ashley, his newly acquired British wife (the former Edith Hawkes, who would one day become the fourth Mrs. Clark Gable), were the only Hollywood luminaries present other than Arthur and Myrna themselves. After the ceremony, and the celebratory dinner that immediately followed, the Hornblows drove north to Palos Verdes, California.
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The long-awaited wedding came as something of an anticlimax, since the high drama between Arthur and Myrna had peaked weeks before. The turning point came in late May of 1936, immediately after Arthur’s divorce from Juliette Crosby was finalized in Reno. From the time four years back when they realized they were in love and wanted to stay together, Arthur had been telling Myrna that his hopes of becoming her husband were being repeatedly dashed, because Juliette wouldn’t agree to a divorce. Juliette would decades later tell Myrna, with whom she became friendly, that this tale amounted to little more than an Arthurian legend, pure fiction. Arthur had
not
been pestering her for a divorce; she had
not
stood in his way (
BB
, 95).

Whatever the case regarding Arthur’s truthfulness in the matter, it is certain that once Juliette obtained the divorce, on grounds of incompatibility, Arthur, at last free to marry, continued stalling for several weeks. Hurt and angry at the perceived rejection, Myrna took leave of Arthur’s Bel Air house, where she’d been staying, though she always maintained an independent address. It’s easy to imagine doors slamming. Accompanied by two protective women friends, Betty Black and Shirley Hughes, Myrna headed for the hills: her rustic cabin at Lake Arrowhead, a mountain ski resort above San Bernardino where many other film professionals also escaped to vacation retreats. Myrna had recently upgraded the simple Lake Arrowhead cabin, hiring a decorator to help her fix it up to meet Arthur’s exacting standards. A canopy now adorned the double bed, and she installed a private ski jump outdoors. After spending a forlorn week in Bel Air without a word from Myrna, Arthur sent a message to her that amounted to waving a white flag of surrender. Life without you isn’t worth living, the message said. Let’s get married right away (
BB
, 127).

Arthur had become a prominent, well-paid Paramount producer whose 1935 film
Ruggles of Red Gap
was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. His $71,375 salary for 1935 would be worth roughly fifteen times that now, and he also got a percentage of profits from the films he produced. Known for his cosmopolitan taste and New York–by-way-of-Europe sophistication, he wore many feathers in his professional cap. For instance, Arthur had been responsible for bringing Ronald Colman to Goldwyn and to talkies. He had also negotiated directly with Sinclair Lewis for the film rights to
Arrowsmith
. He’d worked with some titans and had come to think of himself as one of the film community’s anointed.
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This is not to say that every film produced by Arthur Hornblow Jr. rated five stars. Like most studio-contract producers, he turned out his share of routine programmers, including one Paramount dud,
Wings in the Dark
, pairing Myrna Loy with Cary Grant for the first time. It’s unfortunate that the well-read Arthur wasn’t able to put his own abilities and some sterling players to work on a stronger vehicle. This one stumbled on a truly absurd Nell Shipman–Philip Hurn script that required Grant to portray a pilot who loses his eyesight but flies blind, guided by the sure hand of Myrna Loy, the selfless stunt aviatrix who loves him. “High altitudes have a tendency to make scenarists just a trifle giddy,” André Sennwald dryly commented in his
New York Times
review.
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Cary Grant and Myrna Loy became friendly during shooting, but
Wings in the Dark
wastes their talents and prompts an unintentional laugh fest. It does boast some accomplished aerial photography by Dewey Wrigley, and it allowed Myrna Loy to meet Amelia Earhart when Earhart visited the set as a consultant. She and Myrna posed together for the still camera, but Earhart couldn’t rescue
Wings in the Dark
. No one could.

At Paramount, where he’d been producing films since leaving Goldwyn’s employ in 1933, Arthur had met the wealthy banker Frank Vanderlip, a former assistant secretary of the treasury and president of National City Bank. Vanderlip became a Paramount bondholder and then chairman of the board after it went into receivership as a result of Depression-related theater closings and lagging ticket sales. The patrician investor, who lived primarily on the East Coast, owned a magnificent spread on a bluff overlooking the Pacific at Palos Verdes’s Portuguese Bend. He named the estate Villa Narcissa after his impressively unnarcissistic wife, Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, a mother of six who was a former suffragist and advocate for women and children. Mrs. Vanderlip had worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on progressive reform campaigns and had been a founder of the League of Women Voters in New York.

The Vanderlips leased Villa Narcissa, a copy of an actual Roman villa, to newlyweds Arthur and Myrna. There they stayed for some months, their prized tranquility often interrupted by the screeching of the Vanderlips’ outdoor flock of resident peacocks and by the quieter indoor voices of people gathered around a table at animated planning sessions. The Hornblows were meeting with the architect Roland E. Coate and with landscapers, an interior decorator, and builders, laying out blueprints for the design of an ambitious Beverly Hills estate on a wild, secluded, deer- and coyote-inhabited five-acre lot off winding Hidden Valley Road in Coldwater Canyon. Arthur didn’t think small. He and his new wife intended to create for themselves something grand but understated, a home and grounds that expressed the style, refinement, and attention to detail that Hollywood had come to associate with the name Arthur Hornblow Jr. Myrna joined in the planning, but Arthur took the helm here, as he tended to do in general.

Arthur and Myrna entertained often on weekends during their idyllic time at Palos Verdes, hosting luminaries of the movie world. In this social sphere there weren’t many degrees of separation among the participants. Everyone had worked with, had an affair with, or had married everyone else at one time or another, or was kin to someone well known in the movie colony. If not literally the case, it seemed that way.

Ernst Lubitsch might head over and dive straight into the Pacific. Myrna already knew the famed Berlin-born director who did so much to change the map of American film comedy and who had briefly served as Arthur’s boss during Lubitsch’s single year as Paramount’s head of production. During Myrna’s early days at Warner Bros., which coincided with Lubitsch’s debut directing assignments at that studio, he’d given her a bit part in the Frenchified marital comedy
So This Is Paris
. Alas for Myrna, she never worked with him after that, but she got to know him socially. Hosting him at Palos Verdes, she’d spot him emerging from the sea, his abundant wet, black body hair clinging to his skin and making him look “like some mythical monster” of the deep (
BB
, 131). In his street clothes, with his perennial cigar drooping from his mouth like an extra tongue, his gnome’s face, and his short, chubby frame, Lubitsch in appearance fit the stock comic roles he’d once played in German cabarets and silent two-reelers.

Loretta Young, now in her radiant twenties and under contract at 20th Century–Fox, had known Myrna since their starlet days at Warner Bros., when Young played the innocent good girl to Loy’s oversexed gypsy vixen in
The Squall
. They’d renewed acquaintance at Goldwyn, vying on the screen for Ronald Colman’s love and attention in the film that introduced Myrna to Arthur,
The Devil to Pay
. Young would arrive at Villa Narcissa on a Sunday morning on the arm of Eddie Sutherland, a London-born director who’d served back in 1923 as Chaplin’s assistant and had once, also in the 1920s, been married to Louise Brooks. Sutherland collected wives. As Albert Hackett said of him, “He married a lot. Not in groups—one at a time.”
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Sutherland had recently directed the Arthur Hornblow Jr. Paramount production of
Mississippi
, a musical set on a riverboat.
Mississippi
showcased Rodgers and Hart songs, but despite this bonus the production foundered. The film’s star, Bing Crosby, kept disappearing from the set, and the riverboat captain, played by W. C. Fields, according to biographer James Curtis, harbored “genuine disdain” for Arthur Hornblow, though he could console himself with the company of Eddie Sutherland, the film’s director and an old friend. The friction on the
Mississippi
set didn’t interfere, however, with the bonhomie between Arthur and Sutherland. As for Sutherland’s Sunday date, Loretta Young, she attested that when she and Sutherland visited the Hornblows at Villa Narcissa, she felt welcome and well looked after (
BB
, 132). Myrna would arrange for Loretta, a devout Catholic, to be driven to a nearby Paso Robles church to attend Mass.
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Another director with whom Arthur had worked in the past and would work again, Mitchell Leisen, turned up often at the Vanderlip spread. A former costume designer and art director for Cecil B. DeMille, the bisexual Leisen usually arrived at the Hornblows’ accompanied by fellow costume designer Natalie Visart, his on-again, off-again lover and intimate friend over many decades. They could never marry because Leisen was divorced and Visart an observant Roman Catholic.