Myrna Loy (3 page)

John Johnson and A. W. Sederburg tried their luck in the gold-rich streams and quartz mines but soon settled for a surer way to survive. As partners they opened a cabinet shop in town, on the ground floor of a two-story log building they constructed, which also housed the Masonic temple. There they built and sold tables, dressers, bedsteads, washstands, chairs, and cedar caskets. John Johnson continued placer mining, too, during the warmer months and, when Della was only eight, made a habit of taking her along to the diggings.
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Myrna’s paternal grandfather, David Thomas Williams, a rancher, died at age sixty-eight, the year before she was born. Known as D. T. Williams, he started out on a Welsh farm in Neath, near Swansea, sailing at age twenty from Liverpool to Philadelphia in 1856. If he’d remained in southern Wales, where coal mining, copper smelting, and the railroad were blackening the cities, he believed his scant resources and lack of education would have condemned him to a grim future. In 1880, twenty-four years after emigrating, he still could not read or write English, according to the U.S. Census. When he was new to American soil, he tried coal mining in Pennsylvania, then gold mining in Mason City, Virginia, and the California Sierras, before making his way to Austin, Nevada. There he met his future wife, Ann Morgan Davis, she of the auburn hair, tilted nose, green eyes, and freckles that Myrna would inherit. To convince Ann and her immigrant Welsh parents that he would make a trustworthy husband, Williams went into business hauling freight from Salt Lake City with two four-horse teams. Having impressed his future in-laws, he married Ann in Toole, Utah, but the couple did not linger there. After their first child was born, they switched from hauling freight to ranching and moved to Elk City, Idaho, where they raised cattle and horses and had a second child. The enterprising and tireless D. T. had his eye on the open range of Montana Territory, which offered cheap land for homesteaders, lots of it, and was booming. Now that gold seekers were flocking to the mining camps, they would need horses for transportation, herding cattle, and plowing. The newcomers would be hungry for beef and bread, as would the settlers at military forts and Indian agencies. Boardinghouses would need milk and butter. The recently arrived cowboys and farmers would be donning leather chaps, vests, and boots, all of which made horse and cattle ranching and wheat farming seem to him winning undertakings, despite the relentless toil and hardship they entailed. D. T. and Ann set out in 1870 for Montana’s Crow Creek Valley, each driving a wagon. The pregnant Ann drove their two children and her blind mother, along with blueberry and gooseberry bushes and apple tree seedlings to transplant in Montana (
BB
, 4–5). When Myrna revisited the ranch a final time in the early 1980s, a few of Ann’s gnarled apple trees were blooming in what used to be her orchard.
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Whenever Myrna recalled stories about her frontier forebears, she wondered at their grit, can-do spirit, resourcefulness, and courage. She did not share the scathing opinion voiced by her father’s friend, the celebrated western painter Charles Russell, that the pioneer should be seen as a despoiler, a desecrator of virgin land who “traps all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass.” She hailed Grandfather Williams for his up-by-the-bootstraps rise from the poverty of his boyhood and for accumulating enough Montana land and stock to render him one of the wealthiest men in his county (which was Jefferson County first, then became Broadwater after 1897). Under the 1862 Homestead Act, which Abraham Lincoln had signed, in 1870 the newcomer D. T. Williams could and did acquire 160 acres of public Montana Territory land in the Crow Creek Valley, land that had long been a buffalo hunting ground for migrating Flathead, Shoshone, Blackfoot, and Crow Indians and, since the coming of Lewis and Clark to the Missouri River headwaters in 1805, had seen an occasional white trapper, hunter, fur trader, or mountain man. With the advent of the gold rush, farmers, other ranchers, and a few merchants and innkeepers were beginning to join the miners invading the area, the only valley of the Missouri River.
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To take title to the 160 acres, D. T. Williams had to “prove up.” That meant he had to live on the land for five years and make improvements on it. He built a log house, chicken coops, a barn, corrals, and split-log fences. Fifteen years later, under the Desert Land Act, he bought another two hundred acres for twenty-five cents an acre, parts of which he had to irrigate with ditches, for despite the Crow Creek, the land was often dry. He planted acres of wheat, displacing wild grass, buffalo berry, brush, pine, cedar, and willow trees. Myrna boasted that by the time Montana became a state, in 1889, her grandfather owned fifteen hundred head of cattle, many horses, and most of Crow Creek Valley’s acreage (
BB
, 6–8). He held stock in several mines, as well.

For all her pride in the prominence of D. T. Williams and the craft and industry of her Johnson grandfather, Myrna identified most with her grandmothers. “They’ve always been heroic figures to me,” she said, “my two grandmothers, coming from protected childhoods in Wales and Scotland to a strange land, fighting like hell to make civilized environments for their men and children” (
BB
, 7).

Twice widowed by the age of forty-five, Grandmother Isabella Giles Wilder Johnson was the only one of Myrna’s grandparents that she actually got to know, the other three having died before she came into the world. Grandmother Johnson rarely complained. “She never took anything as a hardship. She had a lusty, fearless joy in life, and hardships were a part of life and you took them standing up.” Born in Largs, Scotland, Isabella had set out on a sailing vessel from Scotland in her teens. She traveled with an aunt, leaving behind her bereft mother and many siblings. In America Isabella married at age seventeen, but her first husband died in Iowa, where they had been living. She arrived in Radersburg as a widow with a four-year-old son, James Wilder (
BB
, 6–7). No doubt she hoped to be able to support James with what she gleaned from the diggings in Montana gold country. When she joined a wagon train to cross the plains, she brought along her cut glass and French china. Soon after arriving in Radersburg, she married the Swedish carpenter John Johnson, who with his partner, Sederburg, built them a house. The Johnsons would have three children, of whom Della was the youngest.
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Compared to Europe and the eastern states, the western mining frontier offered women greater independence, more social flexibility, and an opportunity to speak out. For a woman to work outside the home was not unusual in Montana. Myrna’s Johnson aunt, LuLu Belle, became county treasurer, and Myrna grew up hearing spirited political talk around the dinner table. That an aunt sought and won public office is not surprising. The Williams family lived in a state that would follow the leads of other western states—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Washington, California, Kansas, and Arizona—in granting women the vote in 1914, six years before the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised women nationally. Montana in 1917 elected Jeanette Rankin the first U.S. congresswoman. Myrna Loy always attributed her own political activism to the atmosphere in her home and home state. As she saw it, the scant number of Montana citizens made each voice count for more.
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Della’s uppity spirit was a source of strife, contributing to a contentious marriage that survived several separations. David’s quarrel with her about her picture on the magazine cover was neither the first nor the last of its kind. Though Della and David knew one another from childhood, they saw the world differently and often took opposite sides in an argument. He was a Republican, she a lifelong Democrat. The pleasure-loving, musical Della, an accomplished pianist, studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago and, before marrying, had considered a career as a concert artist, but she said, “I had to abandon all thoughts of realizing that ambition when I married.” She continued to enjoy performing on the piano and organ.
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David, though he shed his Presbyterian parents’ unbending religious faith, clung to their straitlaced morality. He had little feeling for the performing arts and considered a woman’s public display a step toward the gutter. Della, whose father carved and painted wood figures and crafted cedar furniture, identified with artists, while David favored practical, remunerative, and traditionally masculine pursuits: ranching, selling land and cattle, appraising farms for a bank, serving the community via his lodge. At his father’s ranch during his younger days he wore a ten-gallon hat, rode horses, chowed down with cowhands, drove cattle, and roped steers. He lacked the long, lean good looks of his fellow Montanan, and future Hollywood cowboy, Gary Cooper—David’s face was round and his build chunky—but in his youth he lived the rough-and-tumble outdoor life of a genuine cowpuncher. Later, in Helena, he sat on bank boards, but as an appraiser and seller of farmland he continued to spend time outdoors, often in the saddle. Della, too, rode a horse confidently, because a Montana woman simply had to. But in contrast to David, Della, after her father’s early death, inhabited a cultured world of women presided over by her mother, who sang at the piano, read books, put up jelly, baked ginger cookies, and cultivated the tiger lilies and pansies in her garden.
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The friction between Della and David rarely erupted into open warfare, but it remained a constant during Myrna’s girlhood. Myrna had no model of marital harmony. The screen’s future Perfect Wife came out of a less than perfect union in which Della’s role was neither consistently nor clearly defined. Della balked at being purely domestic yet lacked economic independence. Music-making showcased her skills, providing pleasure, an identity distinct from that of wife and mother, and activity, but no income. The compliant wife Myrna Loy sometimes played both in movies and in her real-life marriages was definitely not modeled on her mother.

When Della Mae Johnson and David Franklin Williams got married in Helena in March of 1904, twenty-four-year-old Della had completed her musical training in Chicago, and David, one year older than his bride, had finished school at the Commercial Department of the State Agricultural College in Bozeman. At age twenty-three, just a few years after finishing college, he’d been the youngest man ever elected to serve a term in the Montana legislature, representing Broadwater County as a Republican in 1903. His particular interests as a representative were education, agriculture, irrigation, and water rights. Just prior to their wedding David and Della had been living as single young people in Helena, sharing a lively circle of friends, but they returned to the Williams ranch in Crow Creek Valley after tying the knot. David, whose prosperous parents both died within months of his marriage, abandoned politics and took over at the Williams ranch, working as a stockman and farmer. He was not its sole owner, however, but a part owner with his two brothers and two sisters. His father’s will had left the land in equal one-fifth shares to his five surviving children. Della, much happier in Helena, served reluctantly as a ranch wife, even though she was moving closer to her hometown. She knew how to cook but hated doing it. The ranch employed a Chinese cook. Holiday meals, according to Myrna, were always prepared by her father, who sometimes brought home from Chicago cracked crab on ice.
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The Williams ranch, called “The Home Place” in legal documents, had no electricity or outdoor plumbing. Water used for bathing, cooking, or laundry had to be pumped by hand and heated in a barrel. Ice that was needed to keep perishables fresh was stored in an icehouse and covered with sawdust to prevent it from thawing. Helena offered many more of the amusements, conveniences, and comforts that Della appreciated than did the remote Crow Creek Valley, about fourteen miles from the nearest train station. A photograph exists, too blurry to enable reproduction, that captures an idyllic moment of ranch life several years after Della and David settled there: Della, in trousers, white shirt, and sun hat, sits on a saddled dark-coated horse; Myrna, behind her (about five years old), rides a smaller white horse, and near both a dark filly with her colt grazes on sunlit grass.
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David and Della grew up on the raucous mining frontier after the gold rush had peaked. Big changes were afoot in the Montana Territory. When they were toddlers, in the early 1880s, herds of buffalo still blackened the plains, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which Colonel George Custer and 120-odd other members of the 7th Cavalry died fighting Sioux and Cheyenne Indians fewer than two hundred miles southeast from Radersburg, was a recent memory. White settlers still talked about it, as they talked about Chief Joseph’s dramatic 1877 attempt to lead his band of Nez Pierce to refuge in the nearby Bitterroot Mountains. Many of the white cattlemen held the Native Americans in contempt and, fearing attacks, demanded protection from the U.S. military, which established posts throughout the territory. By 1883 the buffalo had disappeared, wiped out by a combination of overhunting and disease introduced by cattle. The Indians, once dependent on the buffalo herds, moved onto reservations, but the vast reservations often had to cede portions of land to provide right-of-way to the builders of the Great Northern–Northern Pacific Railway.
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David managed to grow up without racial bigotry, and in his time at the legislature befriended fellow representative Frank Linderman, a hunter and trapper turned newspaperman and author who became fascinated with the stories told to him by Flathead, Cree, Crow, and Chippewa tribesmen he befriended. His well-known
Indian Why Stories
, a collection of tales with illustrations by Charles Russell, helped teach the white man something of the red man’s traditions. Linderman was one of the non-Indians who joined with Indians pushing for a home for landless Crees and Chippe-was. In his thirties David Franklin Williams joined that effort, which resulted in the 1911 formation of the Rocky Boy Reservation near Havre, at the abandoned Fort Assiniboine. This reservation was and still is owned by its occupants, not the U.S. government (
BB
, 8).