Myrna Loy (38 page)

One MGM movie about adultery that, because of the Code, never did see production was called
Infidelity
and was scripted by none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1934 Fitzgerald had listed Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, Miriam Hopkins, Helen Hayes, and Ann Harding as the five Hollywood actresses he thought had what it took to portray Nicole Diver, the beautiful, rich, and mentally ill wife of the psychiatrist Dick Diver, in a proposed, unrealized screen adaptation of
Tender Is the Night
. A few years later, Fitzgerald imagined a role for Loy in
Infidelity
, a screenplay about a married couple haunted by old loves. Fitzgerald had rejoined Hunt Stromberg’s stable of MGM screenwriters in 1937 after an absence of six years. Trying to stop drinking and at an emotional and financial low ebb, he’d returned to MGM, despite previous frustrations as a screenwriter, in a desperate attempt to resuscitate his bank account and get his life together.
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While working on the screenplay for
The Women
, he revised
Infidelity
, undertaken as a vehicle for Joan Crawford. Breen immediately ran interference, objecting to the very idea of a film about adultery. Making what he called “a deep bow to the censors,” Fitzgerald tried to salvage the project. He rethought the plot, turning it into a story about thievery instead of adultery. He also revised the casting choices he wanted, replacing (in discussions with Hunt Stromberg) steamy Joan Crawford with tamer, classier Myrna Loy, who in his eyes seems to have represented a combination of desirability and gentility. As soon as he imagined the cast change, he wrote to Stromberg, “the whole thing brightened for me.” But it didn’t brighten for MGM, which lost interest in the project.
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Myrna never knew about Fitzgerald’s plans for her. The
Infidelity
debacle shows, though, how Hollywood’s play-it-safe climate victimized her, as well as Fitzgerald. The power of the Code, combined with the conservatism of MGM, kept stifling potentially strong movies. The original Fitzgerald script might have made a first-rate film, but it didn’t stand a chance. “MGM has meant safety, not speculation, for eleven years,” an ad in
Variety
proclaimed, touting the studio’s forty-nine productions slated for release in a banner year, 1935–36. The formulaic, the corny, the plush, and the safe kept winning out.

Irving Thalberg’s death in September of 1936 contributed to a downturn at MGM that prevailed in the later 1930s. Although Myrna never had a lot of direct contact with him after the career-changing moment when he told her, face-to-face, that she must tear off the veil that was separating her from her audience, his shocking but not altogether unexpected death at age thirty-seven brought a shift at the studio that had an impact on everyone who worked there. The name
Thalberg
had spelled quality. He had most recently produced a string of big films based on literary classics:
Camille, Romeo and Juliet, The Good Earth
. Now, as Joan Crawford put it, “Thalberg was dead and the concept of the quality ‘big’ picture pretty much went out the window.” At his funeral, which Myrna attended, along with just about every other Hollywood luminary, the officiating Rabbi Magnin read a message from President Roosevelt, saying, “The world of art is poorer with the passing of Irving Thalberg.” One could argue that “art” was never the goal at MGM, but with Thalberg around, it was often a by-product of efforts to entertain and make money. Post-Thalberg MGM would undertake fewer productions based on literary classics or Broadway plays. Good screenwriting would carry less weight. Mayer turned against what he considered the highbrow interests of his onetime protégé. Now child actors, middlebrow fare, and family themes—the Andy Hardy series, for instance—took the lead. The long-established MGM screenwriter Anita Loos said of Thalberg at the time of his passing that “he’d taken the studio to the top of a toboggan run. From now on there’s only one direction MGM can go.”
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Box office also declined generally around 1938. In the summer of that year Ruth Waterbury reported in
Photoplay
that Hollywood production had reached an all-time low. “The public is staying home in droves,” she wrote, “and why not? We can get every movie star of any importance almost any night on our radios, free.” The decline in production was also a response to the diminishing market in Europe as war clouds gathered and Hollywood filled up with refugees fleeing Hitler.
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With the golden movie year 1939 (when MGM profits would hit $9.5 million) still to come, I don’t want to dig MGM’s grave. But William Powell was about to confront a health crisis that would remove him from the screen for close to two years. Myrna Loy could anticipate performing in some potentially quite popular and lucrative movies, sans Powell, in the immediate future. But a season of trouble awaited her, and the course of her life was about to shift.

CHAPTER 12

Trouble

Jean Harlow’s death in June 1937 came as a blow, to Myrna and to just about the entire American film community. The sudden demise of any twenty-six-year-old jolts survivors, but Harlow wasn’t just anyone. She was Myrna’s dear friend and MGM colleague, the screen’s embodiment of youthful lusciousness. In life Harlow had a childlike quality, an unaffected niceness that clashed with her dangerous bombshell image. Her mother called her “The Baby,” and the words “Our Baby” are inscribed on her tomb. Babies aren’t supposed to die.

Jean had been Bill Powell’s lover and would-be fiancée for close to three years, and during that time Myrna watched their interplay from a ringside seat. Although they got along splendidly, sharing Kansas City memories and a love of fun, it was becoming more and more clear that they didn’t want the same things out of their relationship. They kept butting heads over the issue of marriage. In some ways Harlow’s frustrating situation reprised what Myrna had gone through with Arthur: a delectable young Hollywood actress yearning to marry the older (in Powell’s case much older) man she adores and looks up to. Drawn to father figures, as was Myrna, Harlow called Powell “Daddy.” Ever eager to please Bill, she would sew buttons on his shirts. But she began to realize that she couldn’t change Bill’s understandable wariness of Hollywood trips to the altar. He wanted no more two-career marriages, no more children, and he didn’t like the idea of Jean’s dominating mother hovering over her every move.

Powell could be generous and indulgent to Jean. He spent ample time with her and presented her with a huge star-sapphire ring, which the press, and sometimes Harlow herself, mistook for an engagement ring. He often shared his palatial Beverly Hills house with her. But he wasn’t going to budge on the marriage issue, and Jean, though still crazy about him, had begun dating someone else. She told Louella Parsons she knew that she and Bill Powell would never wed.
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To complicate Myrna’s grief, she was tormented by the feeling that she might have prevented this tragedy but failed. She’d spotted evidence of Harlow’s deteriorating health and tried to intervene. In San Francisco in the fall of 1936, while Jean was briefly away from her overbearing Christian Scientist mother, Myrna alerted Bill Powell to her alarm, advising him that Jean needed to be examined and evaluated by a first-rate physician, pronto. Powell made no objection, but he didn’t share Myrna’s sense of urgency and wasn’t convinced that Harlow’s situation was life-threatening, believing his sweetheart merely had the flu.

Since she didn’t succeed in her efforts to get Harlow to see a doctor, Myrna set up a medical appointment for her ailing friend with Dr. Saxton Pope, a San Francisco physician connected with the University of California Hospital. Saxton Pope Jr. was Myrna’s own San Francisco physician during her 1935 hospitalization. She avoided getting medical care in fishbowl Los Angeles because she wanted to preserve her privacy. Myrna saw the Popes—Saxton and his wife, Jeanne—socially, too. The social connection allowed Myrna, not usually a meddler, to concoct a scheme that might save Jean. Since Harlow didn’t keep the medical appointment Myrna set up, and wouldn’t submit to a physician’s examination in San Francisco, social encounters between Dr. Pope and Harlow would have to suffice. The doctor could at least take a look at Harlow and appraise her general demeanor.

Dr. Pope agreed, after spending time with Jean, that something was seriously wrong with her health, and her heavy drinking didn’t help. Her face was puffy and gray, she complained of exhaustion, and she had little appetite. On the sly he felt her pulse and found it irregular. He had no authority to take any medical steps so long as Jean wasn’t his patient, and he did nothing more than talk to Myrna about his concern. Before the advent of kidney dialysis or transplants, there was little he could have done to restore her health, but this is clear only in hindsight. Harlow did get medical attention before she died, contrary to what Myrna believed. Two different Los Angeles physicians attended her during her final days. Only one of them made the correct diagnosis of nephritis. It’s a myth—one that Myrna, along with many others, believed—that the Christian Science credo of Harlow’s mother prevented care that might have saved Harlow’s life. In that era kidney failure spelled doom.
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When she succumbed to uremic poisoning brought on by acute nephritis, Harlow had been suffering from kidney failure for at least a decade but didn’t know it. She’d been sidelined by several recent episodes of illness and had been forced to miss days of work at MGM, but the underlying cause hadn’t been explained. We would say now that her immune system had been compromised, hence the frequent infections and physical overreactions.

Actor illnesses were inconvenient for movie studios. It was expensive to halt a picture midproduction. “I just don’t dare to have a cold in the head,” Myrna once complained in an interview. “It would cost the studio thousands of dollars. I have to act like a piece of breakable porcelain, which Heaven only knows I’m not.” Jean Harlow’s box-office value was such that her sick days really hurt MGM in the wallet. Her star wattage had recently won her an invitation to meet President and Mrs. Roosevelt in Washington and a coveted spot on the cover of
Life
. At MGM her status soared (as did Myrna’s), partly because after Thalberg’s death the ranks had continued to thin among the studio’s top actresses: grieving Norma Shearer withdrew for a time, and Joan Crawford’s recent screen outings hadn’t matched her earlier box-office triumphs. Even the luminous Garbo, who could command a salary of $275,000 for just one picture, had seen a dip in popularity. Her 1937 costume movie
Conquest
lost more than a million dollars, and she soon would be branded “box office poison.” Harlow’s salary that last year of her life was listed as $146,120, compared to Myrna Loy’s $123,916, William Powell’s $164,533, and Gable’s $235,338. She hadn’t yet completed her final film,
Saratoga
, a racetrack comedy romance costarring Clark Gable, when she collapsed on the set near the end of May 1937.
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Saratoga
was Harlow’s sixth film opposite Gable; their fifth had been the previous year’s
Wife vs. Secretary
, in which all the characters suspect that Harlow and her boss, Gable, are carrying on an affair, but the audience knows that they actually aren’t. You could say that Harlow and Gable had grown up together as movie stars. At the time of their first joint screen outing, in a 1931 gangster drama called
The Secret Six
, Harlow was just twenty and new to Metro, which had borrowed her from Howard Hughes. Neither Harlow nor Gable played prominent roles in
The Secret Six
, but in their next film together the following year,
Red Dust
, they costarred, and their torrid love scenes ignited a bonfire. By this time Harlow’s contract with Hughes had been bought by MGM; she was being groomed for major stardom. Gable, too, was a comer. Each had that special something it takes to trigger the fantasies of millions. In the words of the MGM still photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull, “Hell, they were everybody’s lovers.”
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Gable was shaken by Harlow’s sudden death in the midst of shooting
Saratoga
and was outraged, as was his sweetheart Carole Lombard, when Jack Conway, the director of
Saratoga
, and L. B. Mayer jointly called Lombard the same day Harlow died to ask Carole to take over the part that Harlow had left incomplete. Lombard had been considered for the role of the story’s horse-breeding heiress Carol Clayton early on, before Harlow got the assignment. Since she started going with Gable, Lombard had been trying to angle a way to work with him again, but subbing for Harlow on the heels of her shocking death wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind. Harlow’s movie double took the assignment, instead, and fans, eager for a last glimpse of the actress now enshrined as one of Hollywood’s immortals, flocked to see
Saratoga
, when it was quickly completed and rushed into release. It became a top box-office winner of 1937, proving that the publicity generated by a young star’s unexpected and shocking demise can readily be spun into box-office gold.
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During Harlow’s final illness, Powell and Loy were filming
Double Wedding
, directed by Richard Thorpe. Harlow had stopped by the
Double Wedding
set on her last day at MGM, and Thorpe heard her tell Powell, “Daddy, I don’t feel good. I’m going home.” She survived less than a week after that, but, of course, work on
Double Wedding
had to resume after a one-day pause for the funeral. Loy and Powell had trouble continuing to clown around on cue after that, but they completed the film. No wonder neither Powell nor Loy could muster any fondness for that picture, with its antic wedding ceremony at the conclusion.
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