Myrna Loy (29 page)

Leisen had deep roots in the silent era, unlike Arthur, who came to Hollywood from Broadway to help Goldwyn find and develop material for talkies. Leisen had designed costumes for
Robin Hood
and
The Thief of Bagdad
, two important Fairbanks vehicles, and for DeMille’s
Madam Satan
, where Natalie Visart also worked as a designer. Natalie had attended the Hollywood School for Girls with Katherine DeMille, adopted daughter of Cecil, and remained close to her. That connection, plus Natalie’s talent, led to her hiring as a DeMille designer and her professional collaboration with Mitchell Leisen.

Fascinated by dreams and renowned as a designer of dream sequences, Leisen saw a psychiatrist regularly. Myrna, who would later enter psychotherapy, had long been drawn to matters psychological and had done some reading on the subject. Like many of her acting peers, she linked insightful performances with psychological astuteness. As for Natalie Visart, she too had an interest in what made people tick and would converse with Myrna about complex relationships, her own passionate, troubled, and unlikely bond with Mitchell Leisen providing plenty of grist. Leisen, who was also enmeshed in a love affair with the dancer and choreographer Billy Daniels, had a breakdown in 1937. Visart would subsequently, in the 1940s, become pregnant by Leisen and suffer a miscarriage. Natalie Visart, who after her marriage to the writer Dwight Taylor became Natalie Taylor, remained Myrna’s enduring ally and confidante.
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The agent Collier Young, a favorite within the Hornblow circle, attended weekend gatherings when visiting from New York. He would continue to move in Myrna’s orbit over many years and many matings, since he was also pals with Arthur’s good friend and Myrna’s future husband Gene Markey. “Collie,” a perpetually charming and youthful man who became a Hollywood writer, story editor, and producer, was a Dartmouth graduate like both Arthur and Gene.

When he visited the Hornblows at Villa Narcissa, Collie Young arrived with his wife, Valerie, a former actress. He would later wed Ida Lupino, then Joan Fontaine, then Meg Marsh. A waggish cutup who drank too much and told funny stories, he provided the kind of ebullient company that other party animals found irresistible. In her autobiography Joan Fontaine called him “a perennial Peter Pan, a wit and a wag whose avocation was writing and producing. Give him a lampshade and he’d wear it.” She pronounced him her favorite ex-husband.
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Arthur’s and Myrna’s first years of marriage were for the most part harmonious and upbeat, if hectic. They worked nonstop six days a week, reserving Saturday nights and Sundays for one another and friends. If they lucked into a few days to play, they’d drive north to San Francisco or south to Mexico. They conversed endlessly during their times alone about what each was doing professionally. “I’m interested in Arthur’s work and he’s interested in mine,” Myrna told
Photoplay’s
Lee Harrington shortly after she and Arthur moved into their white, rambling, newly completed Coldwater Canyon dream house. She added that music mattered a lot to both Hornblows. “He’s mad for Debussy and so am I.” They also liked Mexican songs. They owned a pear-wood Steinway piano, on which Myrna occasionally practiced pieces she’d learned as a girl, and the turntable on the Capehart phonograph in their music room got plenty of use. Often Myrna studied the lines she had to learn from a shooting script as music played.
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Myrna did everything she could to measure up to Arthur’s standards and to please him. Theresa Penn, her African American maid, reported that when Myrna overcame her impatience with shopping and went off to buy clothes at a fancy shop, she would return to the store any garment that Arthur vetoed, though Arthur “never tells her not to keep something.” He didn’t have to tell her; Myrna knew whether or not he approved. But the perfect wife standard she set for herself came from society at large, not just from Arthur. She wanted to look beautiful for him. She strove to put his needs first. She tried to run the household efficiently. She would be to Arthur the unselfish, giving, and sympathetic wife her mother had refused to be for her father.
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Because Myrna was so seldom at home, she had limited time to devote to the traditional domestic role, but she did plan—always keeping in mind Arthur’s food preferences—daily dinner menus for Sergei the cook to prepare, sometimes cutting out magazine recipes for his use. On the cook’s night off, Myrna told Gladys Hall, “we have a few friends in and we all go in the kitchen and each one makes his or her ‘specialty.’ And Arthur always turns out something fit for the gods. [My specialty is] chef’s assistant! I’m a wonderful potato-peeler, lettuce washer and carrot-dicer.” Her willing assumption of the sous-chef role in the kitchen stands in for her position in other rooms. Not that she considered herself in any way a victim during the early years of her marriage to Arthur. She had almost everything she’d ever wanted.
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Despite being a two-career couple, with both partners working long hours at an exhausting clip, the Hornblows were doing what they loved to do on and off the lot. Arthur relished the role of host. He liked nothing more than selecting the food and wine for a gathering of illustrious friends. He went in for “wines at the right room temperature, exotic imported foods, flowers chosen to match the colors of Myrna’s gowns and guests picked to match the mood of the host.” At their first big party at their new home, guests included the Basil Rathbones (Mrs. Rathbone, the former actress Ouida Bergere, was now a celebrated Hollywood hostess), Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian, Loretta Young, and Joan Crawford, now a top star at MGM and currently married to Franchot Tone.
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Myrna had once been noted, and sometimes chastised, in the film colony for her love of privacy and disinterest in the high life. As recently as August 1935
Photoplay
published an article by Dorothy Manners that pronounced Myrna Loy “the shyest person I have ever met” and concluded, “If Garbo’s isolation has earned her the title of Hollywood recluse, then surely our own Montana-born Myrna is the authentic Miss X of Hollywood, the provocative unknown quantity.” Clearly those days were over for the present. As Arthur’s wife, Myrna emerged into the social limelight, and the press took note of the change in her. “Myrna Loy, once known as a Hollywood recluse, has become a regular gadabout after her marriage,” read the caption on a news photo of the Hornblows dressed in style for a film premiere alongside Mitchell Leisen and Natalie Visart.
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Myrna attended a lunch given by Merle Oberon, along with Marion Davies, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer, the quicksilver Constance Bennett, and her equally stunning sister Joan Bennett, with whom Myrna would later become quite close. Constance and Joan Bennett were two among three actress daughters of Adrienne Morrison and Richard Bennett, an illustrious stage actor who also worked in films and had appeared with Myrna in
Arrowsmith
. Both Constance and Joan Bennett had thriving movie careers. Each had adorned the covers of dozens, maybe hundreds of magazines.
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During her blonde phase Joan Bennett had acted (rather vacantly) in
Hush Money
, one of Myrna’s early crime dramas at Fox, and had costarred opposite Ronald Colman in his first talkie,
Bulldog Drummond
, a Goldwyn picture that introduced her to Arthur. More recently she’d attracted notice playing Amy in George Cukor’s
Little Women
and was Bing Crosby’s love interest in
Mississippi
. Known for the ladylike manner she’d acquired at a Swiss finishing school and a cameo-like beauty, Joan Bennett had a sardonic wit matched by an efficient, independent spirit. That grit developed quickly when she found herself a divorced mother with a child to support at age nineteen. For several years Joan Bennett had been married to the screenwriter, novelist, and sometime producer Gene Markey, and they had a daughter together, Melinda, born in 1934. Since Arthur saw a great deal of Gene at this time, Myrna got to know him and, to some extent, Joan Bennett as well.

Gene Markey had the gift of gab. Well educated, droll, and socially polished, he shone in company. Catnip to women and a collector of beauties, he had dated Gloria Swanson and Ina Claire; he would later add Lucille Ball’s name to his list of conquests. After his 1937 divorce from Joan Bennett he would marry Hedy Lamarr. He and Myrna would wed in 1946. But during her marriage to Arthur, Myrna and Markey were not romantically involved.

At a dinner party in honor of Dashiell Hammett Myrna met George Cukor. Although he had directed some scenes in
The Animal Kingdom
, Myrna never appeared in a George Cukor film, something they both regretted; they were fans of one another’s work. Cukor found Myrna’s face both wise and witty, “the kind of wit that amuses me—underplayed and very, very subtle” (
BB
, vii). They saw each other from time to time but never approached the closeness Cukor shared with Katharine Hepburn, whose career he’d helped create and mold. After a visit to his home decades down the line, Myrna would write to thank Cukor for his hospitality. “You certainly know how to handle a woman. . . . You are a wonderful host and a great director and I am delighted to be your friend. Even as a Dress Extra, you have
class
.”
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Another friend with class, William Powell, became a regular caller at Hidden Valley Road and contributed an orange tree to its orchard. According to Cary Grant, Myrna prized it so much that she took it with her and replanted it after she no longer lived with Arthur. Powell and Jean Harlow often joined the Hornblows to make a social foursome, going off together for high-spirited weekends at Lake Arrowhead.

Arthur didn’t make much room in his life for people without social cachet, fame, or status. An unapologetic elitist, he preferred the company of bright, talented, high-profile members of the entertainment community. Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin all accepted frequent invitations to the Hornblows’, each in turn making a beeline for the beautiful Steinway. Myrna remembered Kern as a diminutive imp who once crawled into and then got stuck in a large ornamental ceramic jar on the Hornblow premises. He had to be carefully eased out by Arthur, Myrna, and several servants enlisted for the task. Richard Rodgers, who’d composed songs for two Myrna Loy movies,
Love Me Tonight
and
Manhattan Melodrama
, and who would later collaborate on Arthur’s movie version of
Oklahoma
, always played his own songs, competing with the other composers for the prized seat in front of the keyboard. Myrna remembered Gershwin, shortly before his untimely death in 1937, as a man who didn’t converse much but who couldn’t stop playing the piano and hated to go to sleep (
BB
, 138). Myrna and Arthur attended a dance in Gershwin’s honor at the Blue Room of the Trocadero following his concert at Philharmonic Auditorium. Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, Sigmund Romberg, and Fred Astaire attended as well.
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Being partly British himself, Arthur reserved space at his table or on his tennis court for members of the Hollywood British colony: Chaplin (Myrna found him self-centered but fascinating), Basil Rathbone, David Niven, Nigel Bruce, Ronald Colman, Alfred Hitchcock, Elsa Lanchester, and Charles Laughton. Arthur had produced a Charles Laughton picture,
Ruggles of Red Gap
, and took a shine to him and Lanchester, his equally amusing character-actress wife. Laughton told Myrna after their first meeting that she reminded him of “Venus de Milo in a traffic jam.”
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Although Arthur had little use for Myrna’s family and received them with reluctance, Myrna continued to see them regularly and to support Della, providing her with a maid, a car, and a chauffeur. When Myrna once attempted to take shelter under Della’s roof after she and Arthur had a quarrel, Della sided with Arthur and told her she must go home to her husband at once. This from a woman who twenty years back, in Helena, had seldom yielded an inch to her own husband. Della remained consistent in her ability to extract all she could from Myrna while at the same time withholding emotional support when a crunch came. Myrna remained overprotective of her talented but spoiled younger brother, David, who wanted a career as an artist or designer but didn’t give either effort much push. Myrna, who was still helping him pay his bills, hired him to decorate her MGM dressing room, and he got his picture in the papers.

According to Betty Black, Arthur also cold-shouldered most of Myrna’s old friends, making an exception of Betty and Bob Black because Bob had rank. A physician, he was an officer in the navy and later chief of the Medical Corps.
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Arthur did invite his elderly father to come from London for a visit on Hidden Valley Road, and he and Myrna also hosted Arthur’s former nanny, Mrs. John Popper of New York. “Mrs. Popper is out on a two month’s vacation with all expenses paid by the Hornblows and is occupying the guest suite at the Hidden Valley ranch. She was almost overcome when Myrna took her on the
Too Hot to Handle
set and introduced her to Clark Gable.”
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Myrna and Arthur were hardly a typical married couple. They lived large, though they tried to avoid Hollywood’s most glaring sins of ostentation on the home front. “[We have] no ballroom, no game room, no projection room, no elaborate bar.” Their grounds did include servants’ quarters, a curved swimming pool whose irregular contour was meant to conjure a natural lake, a tennis court cut out of the side of a hill, and extensive plantings. The garden and orchard filled with lime and other fruit trees constituted Myrna’s special domain. She had dearly wanted, and got, a bathhouse built at the orchard’s edge, an idea she said had been “lifted bodily” from her memory of the Williams cattle ranch of her childhood. “We had a small white milk house, where the milk was stored and churned,” which the architect for the Coldwater Canyon house copied. Both the Montana milk house and its California copy had green shutters and a draping of rambling, fragrant honeysuckle. The rose garden supposedly boasted a hundred different varieties of blooms, and the vegetable garden allowed them to eat homegrown carrots, lettuce, or green beans. For her birthday a few months after they moved into their house Arthur gave her a gold charm bracelet; among the charms was a tiny gold horn (signifying Hornblow) and a miniature wheelbarrow, in honor of the garden.
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